M  C, 


Q^ 


WILLIAM  WSSELINX 

AVTEVR  VAN  WESTINDISE  COMPAXGI 

AET.  SVAE  69.  Ao.  1637 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING 
OF    NEW    YORK 


BY 

THOMAS  A.  JANVIER 

AUTHOR  OF  "  IN  OLD  NEW  YORK  " 
'THE  CHRISTMAS  KALENDS  OF  PROVENCE"  ETC. 


ILLUSTRATED 


NEW  YORK  AND  LONDON 

HARPER  &  BROTHERS  PUBLISHERS 

1903 


Copyright,  1903,  by  HARPER  &  BROTHERS. 

All  rights  resetted. 
Published  October,  1903. 


ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

W.   WSSELINX.     (Avtevr   van  Westindise  Com- 
pangi  Act.  Svae  69.  Ao.  1637)    .     Frontispiece 
MAP  OF  NEW  NETHERLAND.   CIRCA  1616  .     facing      20 
THE  WEST  INDIA  COMPANY'S  HOUSE,  HAARLEM- 
MER  STRAAT,  AMSTERDAM.    1623—1647.     facing      30 

THE  WEST  INDIA  COMPANY'S  WAREHOUSE  AS 
SEEN  FROM  THE  OuDE  ScHANS,  AMSTERDAM. 
— (Built  in  the  year  1641.  Used  as  the  Com- 
pany's meeting-place  in  the  years  1647- 
1674) facing  46 

EARLIEST  KNOWN  VIEW  OF  NEW  AMSTERDAM. 
CIRCA  1630. — Reversed  (following  Mr.  J.  H. 
Innes)  from  Joost  Hartger's  Beschrijvingh  van 
Virginia,  Nieuw  Nederlandt,  etc.  .  .  .  facing  66 

VIEW  OF  NEW  AMSTERDAM.  CIRCA  1650.  SHOW- 
ING THE  CAPSKE  ROCKS,  NOW  COVERED  BY 
BATTERY  PARK. — (From  the  Beschrijvingh  van 
Amerika  of  Arnoldus  Montanus.  Amsterdam, 
1671) facing  84 

THE  TOWN  HOUSE  (STADT  HUYS),  NEW  YORK, 
1679. — (Redrawn  from  the  Bankers  and  Sluy- 
ter  drawing.  See  Memoirs  of  the  Long  Island 

Historical  Society,  vol.  i.) facing      96 

iii 


ILLUSTRATIONS 

FAGE 

THE  VISSCHER  MAP,  WITH  A  VIEW  OF  NEW  AM- 
STERDAM DRAWN  BEFORE  THE  YEAR  1653  facing  112 

THE  WATER  GATE,  FOOT  OF  WALL  STREET.  1679. 
— (Redrawn  from  the  Bankers  and  Sluyter 
drawing.  See  Memoirs  of  the  Long  Island 
Historical  Society,  vol.  i.) facing  122 

THE  ALLAERDT  VIEW  OF  NEW  YORK.  CIRCA 
1668. — (From  the  map  of  Reinier  and  Josua 
Ottens) facing  138 

VIEW  OF  NEW  YORK  FROM  BROOKLYN  HEIGHTS, 
1679.  —  (From  the  Bankers  and  Sluyter 
drawing) facing  166 

"  THE  BUKE'S  PLAN,"  1661-1664.  (Photographed 
for  this  work  from  the  original  in  the  British 
Museum.  Showing  New  Amsterdam  in  the 
year  that  it  became  New  York)  .  .  .  facing  188 


THE   DUTCH   FOUNDING 
OF   NEW   YORK 


THE    DUTCH    FOUNDING 
OF   NEW   YORK 


ARTFUL  fiction  being  more  convinc- 
ing than  artless  fact,  it  is  not  likely 
that  the  highly  untruthful  impression  of 
the  Dutch  colonists  of  Manhattan  given 
by  Washington  Irving  ever  will  be  ef- 
faced. Very  subtly  mendacious  is  Ir- 
ving's  delightful  History  of  New  York  from 
the  Beginning  of  the  World  to  the  End  of 
the  Dutch  Dynasty.  Bearing  in  mind  the 
time  when  he  wrote  —  before  Mr.  Brod- 
head  had  performed  the  great  work  of 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

collecting  in  Europe  the  documents  re- 
lating to  our  colonial  history,  and  while 
the  records  of  the  city  and  of  the  State 
still  were  in  confusion — his  general  truth 
to  the  letter  is  surprising.  But  precisely 
because  of  his  truth  to  the  letter  are  his 
readers  misled  by  his  untruth  to  the 
spirit.  Over  the  facts  which  he  was  at 
such  pains  to  gather  and  to  assemble,  he 
has  cast  everywhere  the  glamour  of  a  be- 
littling farcical  romance :  with  the  result 
that  his  humorous  conception  of  our  an- 
cestral Dutch  colony  peopled  by  a  sleepy 
tobacco-loving  and  schnapps-loving  race 
stands  in  the  place  of  the  real  colony 
peopled  by  hard-headed  and  hard-hitting 
men. 

Irving' s  fancy  undoubtedly  is  kindlier 
than  the  plain  truth.  They  were  a  rough 
lot,  those  Dutchmen  who  settled  here  in 
Manhattan  nearly  three  hundred  years 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

ago ;  and  they  did  not — the  phrase  is  from 
our  own  frontier  vocabulary — come  here 
for  their  health.  As  has  happened  in  the 
case  of  much  later  outpost  settlements 
on  this  continent,  they  cheated  the  sav- 
ages whom  they  found  in  residence,  and 
most  cruelly  oppressed  them.  Also,  on 
occasion,  they  cheated  one  another;  out 
of  which  habit,  as  is  shown  by  the  verbose 
records  of  their  little  courts,  arose  much 
petty  litigation  of  a  snarling  sort  among 
themselves.  In  a  larger  and  more  im- 
personal fashion,  they  consistently  cheat- 
ed the  revenue  laws  of  the  colony;  and 
with  a  fine  equanimity  they  broke  any 
other  laws  which  happened  to  get  in  their 
way — a  line  of  conduct  that  is  not  to  be 
condemned  sweepingly,  however,  because 
most  of  the  revenue  laws  of  the  colony, 
and  many  of  its  general  laws,  were  unjust 
intrinsically  and  were  administered  in  a 

3 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

manner  that  gave  to  those  who  evaded  or 
who  broke  them  a  good  deal  in  the  way  of 
colorable  excuse.  In  a  word,  our  Dutch 
ancestors  who  founded  this  city  had  the 
vices  of  their  kind  enlarged  by  the  vices 
of  their  time.  But,  also,  they  had  cer- 
tain virtues — unmentioned  by  Irving — 
which  in  their  time  were,  and  in  our  time 
still  are,  respectable.  With  all  their  short- 
comings, they  were  tough  and  they  were 
sturdy  and  they  were  as  plucky  as  men 
could  be.  Of  the  easy-going  somnolent 
habit  that  Irving  has  fastened  upon  them 
as  their  dominant  characteristic  there  is 
not  to  be  found  in  the  records  the  slight- 
est trace.  I  am  satisfied  that  that  char- 
acteristic did  not  exist. 

Certainly,  there  was  no  suggestion  of 

somnolence  in  the  promptness  with  which 

the  Dutch  followed  up  Hudson's  practical 

discovery  of  the  river  that  now  bears  his 

4 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

name.  Hudson's  immediate  backers,  to 
be  sure,  the  members  of  the  Dutch  East 
India  Company,  took  no  action  in  the 
premises.  They  had  sent  him  out  to  find 
a  northerly  passage  to  the  Indies — and 
that  he  had  not  found.  What  he  had 
found  was  of  no  use  to  them.  The  region 
drained  by  his  great  river  was  outside  the 
limits  of  their  charter;  and  trade  with  it 
did  not  promise — though  promising  much 
— returns  at  all  comparable  with  those 
which  were  pouring  in  upon  them  from 
their  spice-trade  with  the  East.  There- 
fore, his  voyage  having  been  a  mere  waste 
of  their  money,  they  charged  off  the  cost 
of  it  to  profit  and  loss  and  so  closed  the 
account — while  the  great  navigator,  be- 
ing seized  by  his  own  government  out 
of  the  Dutch  service,  went  off  to  sea 
again:  on  that  final  quest  of  his  for  the 
impossible  passage  to  the  east  by  the 
5 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

north  that  ended  in  his  death  in  Hud- 
son's Bay. 

But  when  Hudson's  report  of  the  fur- 
yielding  country  that  he  had  found  was 
made  public  in  Holland  certain  other  of 
the  Dutch  merchants  pricked  up  their 
ears.  These  were  the  traders  who  carried 
European  and  Eastern  goods  to  Russia 
and  there  bartered  them  for  Muscovy 
furs:  a  commerce  that  had  its  beginning 
toward  the  end  of  the  sixteenth  century, 
and  that  was  greatly  stimulated  by  cer- 
tain concessions  granted  by  the  Czar  to 
the  Dutch  in  the  year  1604.  Those  con- 
cessions provided,  in  effect,  that  goods 
might  be  imported  into  Russia,  and  that 
goods  to  an  equal  value  might  be  export- 
ed thence,  on  the  payment  of  landing  and 
loading  duties  of  two  and  a  half  per  cent., 
while  on  exports  above  the  value  of  im- 
ports a  farther  duty  of  five  per  cent,  was 
6 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

laid:  a  tariff  system  which,  for  those 
times,  was  at  once  so  liberal  and  so 
simple  that  it  drew  to  Archangel  a  fleet  of 
from  sixty  to  eighty  Dutch  ships  a  year. 
But  Hudson's  exposition  of  the  fur- 
trade  possible  in  America  made  a  still 
better  showing.  In  dealing  with  ingenu- 
ous savages,  unhampered  by  a  govern- 
ment of  any  sort  whatever,  there  would 
be  no  duties  to  pay  on  either  imports  or 
exports;  and  instead  of  being  compelled 
to  give  value  for  value — a  custom  that  all 
traders  of  all  times  have  resented — a  ship- 
load of  furs  could  be  had  for  the  insignif- 
icant outlay  of  a  few  jerry-made  hatchets 
and  some  odds  and  ends  of  beads.  (It  is 
but  just  to  the  Netherlanders  to  add  that, 
in  the  passing  of  the  centuries,  they  have 
lost  nothing  of  their  acuteness  in  such 
matters:  as  is  evidenced  by  their  ability 
to  get  and  to  keep  the  weather-gauge  of 
7 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

the  unlucky  savages  of  the  Congo  Pro- 
tectorate to-day.)  And  so,  in  the  summer 
of  1610,  certain  merchants  of  Amsterdam 
— suffering  no  grass  to  grow  under  their 
feet — despatched  to  the  island  of  Man- 
hattan a  vessel  loaded  with  "a  cargo  of 
goods  suitable  for  traffic  with  the  Ind- 
ians " :  and  no  doubt  but  it  was  a  pre- 
cious lot  of  rubbish  that  they  put  on 
board ! 

I  am  sorry  to  say  that  the  name  of 
that  first  trading-ship  sent  to  this  port 
remains  unknown.  But  the  fact  of  her 
sailing  is  established,  as  is  also  the  fact 
that  her  crew  in  part  was  made  up  of 
men  who  had  sailed  with  Hudson  in  the 
Half  Moon.  Mr.  Brodhead  is  of  the  opin- 
ion that  she  was  commanded  by  Hudson's 
Dutch  mate;  and  he  cites  the  tradition 
that  the  Hollanders  who  came  again  to 
this  island,  and  the  Indians  living  here, 
8 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

were  "much  rejoiced  at  seeing  each 
other  " :  a  cordiality  which — however  rea- 
sonable it  might  have  been  on  the  side  of 
the  Dutch — showed  that  the  savages  had 
no  endowment  of  prophetic  instinct  to 
warn  them  that  the  stars  in  their  courses 
were  fighting  against  them,  and  that  then 
was  the  beginning  of  their  end. 

For  my  present  purposes  it  suffices  to 
say  that  the  briskness  with  which  that 
first  trading  voyage  was  undertaken  and 
accomplished  strikes  the  key-note  of 
Dutch  character.  Keenness  and  alert- 
ness— not  the  drowsiness  upon  which 
Irving  so  harps  in  his  persistent  pleas- 
antries— were  the  personal  and  national 
characteristics  of  the  people  who  founded 
this  city;  and  who  founded  it,  we  must 
remember,  in  the  very  thick  of  their 
glorious  fight  for  freedom  with  what  then 
was  the  first  sea  power  of  the  world. 

9 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

Those  qualities  clearly  were  in  evidence 
in  their  despatch  to  Manhattan — almost 
on  the  instant  that  Hudson's  report  of 
his  discovery  was  made  public — of  that 
little  nameless  merchantman:  with  the 
coming  of  which  into  this  harbor,  solely 
as  a  trader,  the  commerce  of  the  port  of 
New  York  began. 


II 


THERE  was  a  nice  touch  of  prophetic 
fitness  in  the  fact  that  the  very  first 
product  of  skilled  labor  on  our  island  was 
a  ship;  and  a  still  nicer  touch — since  the 
commercial  supremacy  of  our  city  was 
assured  at  the  outset  by  its  combined 
command  of  salt-water  and  of  fresh-water 
navigation — in  the  farther  fact  that  that 
ship  was  large  enough  to  venture  out 
upon  the  ocean,  and  yet  was  small  enough 
to  work  her  way  far  into  the  interior  of 
the  continent:  up  the  channels  of  the 
thirteen  rivers  which  fall  into,  or  which 
have  their  outlet  through,  New  York  Bay. 
And,  also,  I  like  to  fancy  that  the  spirit 
of  prophecy  was  upon  the  Dutch  builders 
ii 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

of  that  heroically  great  little  vessel  when 
they  named  her  the  Onrust:  because,  as- 
suredly, the  word  "  Restless  " — in  its  sense 
of  untiring  energy — at  once  describes  the 
most  essential  characteristic  of,  and  is 
the  most  fit  motto  for,  the  city  of  New 
York.  Indeed,  I  wish  that  this  early 
venture  in  ship-building  had  been  remem- 
bered when  our  civic  arms  were  granted 
to  us;  and  that  then — instead  of  our 
beaver  and  of  our  later-added  wind-mill 
sails  and  flour-barrels,  full  of  meaning 
though  those  charges  are — we  had  been 
given  a  ship  for  our  device,  and  with  it 
for  our  motto  the  pregnant  word:  "On- 
rust." 

Our  little  first  ship — built  almost  in 
the  glowing  moment  of  the  city's  found- 
ing— was  a  child  of  disaster;  but  all  the 
more  for  that  reason,  I  think,  was  the 
making  of  her  heroic.  Following  quickly 
12 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

in  the  wake  of  the  little  nameless  mer- 
chantman, other  ships  were  sent  to  the 
river  Mauritius — as  they  were  beginning 
to  call  it  in  honor  of  their  Stadtholder — to 
win  a  share  of  the  profits  in  the  newly- 
opened  trade.  From  Amsterdam  were 
sent  the  Fortune,  commanded  by  Hen- 
drick  Christiansen,  and  the  Tiger,  com- 
manded by  Adrien  Block;  and  another 
ship,  also  called  the  Fortune,  commanded 
by  Cornelis  Jacobsen,  was  sent  out  from 
Hoorn.  By  the  year  1613  half  a  dozen 
voyages  had  been  made ;  and  by  that  time, 
also,  there  was  some  sort  of  a  little  trad- 
ing-post here:  a  group  of  huts,  possibly 
stockaded,  which  stood  where  the  Fort 
stood  later  and  where  the  irrational  walls 
of  the  new  custom-house  are  rising  now. 
The  disaster  to  which  the  building  of 
the  Onrust  was  due  was  the  burning  of 
Block's  ship,  the  Tiger,  just  as  he  was 
13 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

making  ready  to  return  in  her  to  Holland 
— in  the  autumn  of  the  year  1613.  Had 
Block  and  his  men  been  of  a  ruminative 
habit — the  habit  that  Irving  has  ascribed 
to  the  Dutch  generally — they  would  have 
meditated  the  winter  through,  with  their 
hands  in  their  pockets,  upon  the  disaster 
that  had  overtaken  them.  What  they 
actually  did  was  to  set  to  work  instantly 
to  build  another  vessel.  Presumably  they 
saved  from  the  burned  Tiger  what  little 
iron  -  work  they  needed  (ships  in  those 
days  were  pegged  together  with  wooden 
pins,  which  fact  accounts  for  their  com- 
ing apart  so  easily  and  leaking  so  pro- 
digiously), and  for  ship-timber  there  was 
not  need  to  go  farther  up  town — as  we 
should  say  nowadays  —  than  Rector 
Street;  very  likely  there  was  not  need 
to  go  so  far.  And  so  they  buckled  down 
to  their  work,  and  by  the  spring-time  of 
14 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

the  year  1614  the  Onrust  was  finished 
and  launched :  a  yacht,  as  she  was  classed, 
of  forty-four  feet  six  inches  keel;  eleven 
feet  six  inches  beam;  and  of  "  about  eight 
lasts  burthen  " — that  is  to  say,  of  about 
sixteen  tons.  The  Dutch  are  not  a  de- 
monstrative race — but  I  fancy  that  there 
was  cheering  on  this  island  on  the  day 
that  the  Onrust  slid  down  the  ways! 

There  is  good  ground  for  believing  that 
the  ship-yard  in  which  Block  and  his  men 
worked  was  close  by  the  present  meeting 
place  of  Pearl  and  Broad  streets,  on  the 
bank  of  the  creek  that  then  flowed  where 
Broad  Street  now  is.  It  is  my  very  ear- 
nest hope  that  a  monument  may  be  set 
up  there  to  commemorate  that  great 
building  of  our  little  first  ship:  the  an- 
cestor of  all  the  ships  which  have  been 
built  on  this  island  in  the  now  nearly  com- 
pleted three  centuries  since  she  took  the 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

water;  the  ancestor  of  all  the  ships  which 
will  be  built  on  this  island  in  all  the  cen- 
turies to  come.  And  I  am  the  more  eager 
to  see  my  monument  erected  because  at 
this  very  time  precisely  the  site  for  it 
is  being  prepared.  The  purchase  of 
Fraunces's  Tavern,  for  permanent  pres- 
ervation, includes  the  purchase  of  a  half- 
block  of  land  at  Pearl  and  Broad  streets 
— whence  the  modern  houses  are  to  be  re- 
moved, that  in  their  place  may  be  laid  out 
a  little  park.  Possibly  the  Onrust  was 
built  on  the  very  piece  of  land  thus  to  be 
vacated;  almost  certainly  she  was  built 
not  a  stone's  cast  from  its  borders.  In 
that  park,  therefore,  the  monument  to 
New  York's  first  ship  must  stand. 

As  the  direct  result  of  the  building  of 

the  Onrust  the  Dutch  field  of  American 

discovery  and  possession  materially  was 

enlarged.   Block  sailed  away  in  her,  in  the 

16 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

sunshine  of  that  long-past  spring-time,  to 
explore  the  bays  and  rivers  to  the  east- 
ward— "  into  which  the  larger  ships  of  the 
Dutch  traders  had  not  ventured."  He 
laid  his  course  boldly  through  Hell  Gate 
—it  is  probable  that  the  Onrust  was  the 
first  sailing  vessel  to  make  that  perilous 
passage  —  and,  going  onward  through 
Long  Island  Sound,  crossed  Narragansett 
Bay  and  Buzzard's  Bay,  coasted  Cape  Cod, 
and  made  his  highest  northing  in  "Pye 
Bay,  as  it  is  called  by  some  of  our  navi- 
gators, in  latitude  42°  30',  to  which  the 
limits  of  New  Netherland  extend."  As 
he  returned  southward  he  fell  in  with  the 
Fortune,  homeward  bound  from  Man- 
hattan, and  went  back  in  her  to  Holland 
to  report  upon  the  new  countries  which 
he  had  found — leaving  the  Onrust  to  make 
farther  voyages  of  discovery  under  the 
command  of  Cornelis  Hendricksen. 
17 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

Block's  claim  that  Pye  Bay  (in  mercy 
to  summer  residents  upon  the  North 
Shore  of  Massachusetts,  we  call  it  Nahant 
Bay  now)  marked  the  limits  of  New 
Netherland  to  the  northward  was  one  of 
those  liberal  assertions  common  to  the 
explorers  of  his  day.  That  claim  clashed 
with  claims  under  English  grants,  and 
while  it  was  asserted  it  was  not  maintain- 
ed. But  the  Dutch  did  claim  resolutely, 
in  their  subsequent  wranglings  with  the 
English,  as  far  north  as  the  Fresh  Water 
— that  is  to  say,  the  Connecticut  river :  on 
the  ground  that  Block  was  the  first  Euro- 
pean to  enter  that  river,  and  that  the 
Dutch  planted  the  first  European  colony 
upon  its  banks.  On  like  grounds  they 
claimed,  and  for  a  long  while  held  with- 
out dispute,  the  whole  of  Long  Island. 
Broadly  speaking,  therefore,  the  building 
of  the  Onrust  and  the  voyages  made  in 
18 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

her  resulted  in  bringing  within  the  Dutch 
"  sphere  of  influence,"  as  we  should  phrase 
it  nowadays,  both  shores  of  Long  Island 
Sound. 

The  official  record  of  what  the  Onrust 
accomplished,  and  of  what  came  of  it,  was 
spread  upon  the  minutes  of  the  States 
General  (August  18,  1616)  in  these  words: 
"  Cornelis  Henricxs8,  Skipper,  appears  be- 
fore the  Assembly,  assisted  by  Notary 
Carel  van  Geldre,  on  behalf  of  Gerrit 
Jacob  Witssen,  Burgomaster  at  Amster- 
dam, Jonas  Witssen,  Lambrecht  van 
Tweenhuyzen,  Paulus  Pelgrom  cum  sms, 
Directors  of  New  Netherland,  extending 
from  forty  to  five  -  and  -  forty  degrees, 
situate  in  America  between  New  France 
and  Virginia,  rendering  a  Report  of  the 
second  Voyage,  of  the  manner  in  which 
the  aforesaid  Skipper  hath  found  and  dis- 
covered a  certain  country,  bay,  and  three 

19 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

rivers  [the  Housatonic,  Connecticut,  and 
Pequod,  or  Thames]  lying  between  the 
thirty-eighth  and  fortieth  degree  of  Lati- 
tude (as  is  more  fully  to  be  seen  by  the 
Figurative  Map)  in  a  small  yacht  of  about 
eight  Lasts,  named  the  Onrust.  Which 
little  yacht  they  caused  to  be  built  in  the 
aforesaid  Country,  where  they  employed 
the  said  Skipper  in  looking  for  new  coun- 
tries, havens,  bays,  rivers  etc.  Request- 
ing the  privilege  to  trade  exclusively  to 
the  aforesaid  countries  for  the  term  of 
four  years,  according  to  their  High  Might- 
iness's  placard  issued  in  March  1614.  It 
is  resolved,  before  determining  herein, 
that  the  Comparants  shall  be  ordered  to 
render  and  to  transmit  in  writing  the 
Report  that  they  have  made." 


Ill 


THEIR  High  Mightiness's  placard," 
above  cited,  was  an  epoch-making 
document.  It  had  its  origin  in  a  joint 
resolution  of  the  states  of  Holland  and 
West  Vriesland  taken  March  20,  1614, 
"on  the  Remonstrance  of  divers  mer- 
chants wishing  to  discover  new  unknown 
rivers  countries  and  places  not  sought  for 
(nor  resorted  to)  heretofore  from  these 
parts";  and  it  declared  that  "whoever 
shall  resort  to  and  discover  such  new 
lands  and  places  shall  alone  be  privileged 
to  make  four  voyages  to  such  lands  and 
places  from  these  countries,  exclusive  of 
every  other  person,  until  the  aforesaid 
four  voyages  shall  have  been  completed." 
21 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

To  make  the  resolution  effective,  it  was 
sent  up  to  be  confirmed  by  the  Assembly 
of  the  United  Provinces  at  The  Hague; 
and  there,  evidently,  it  had  strong  back- 
ers who  were  in  a  hurry.  Their  High 
Mightinesses  were  not  given  to  acting  pre- 
cipitately. Quite  the  contrary.  But  on 
that  occasion — as  the  result,  we  reason- 
ably may  assume,  of  very  lively  lobbying 
on  the  part  of  a  delegation  sent  to  The 
Hague  from  Amsterdam — the  resolution 
of  the  states  of  Holland  and  West  Vries- 
land  was  "  railroaded  "  at  such  a  rate  that 
in  a  single  week  the  Assembly  had  em- 
bodied it  (March  27th)  in  a  placard,  or 
proclamation,  which  gave  it  the  author- 
ity of  a  national  law.  As  the  making  of 
Manhattan  was  the  outcome  of  the  local 
resolution  and  of  the  general  proclama- 
tion which  gave  it  effective  force,  a  pleas- 
ing parallel  may  be  drawn  between  this 
22 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

piece  of  brisk  legislation  and  other  pieces 
of  brisk  legislation  in  later  times ;  indeed, 
it  is  not  too  much  to  assert  that  the  prec- 
edent then  was  established  of  sending 
lobbying  delegations  from  New  York  to 
Albany — and  I  see  no  reason  for  doubt- 
ing that  The  Hague  lobby  was  run  then 
very  much  as  the  Albany  lobby  is  run 
now.  Customs  and  clothes  change  from 
one  century  to  another;  but  it  is  well  to 
remember  (Borbonius  and  his  omnia  mu- 
tantur  to  the  contrary  notwithstanding) 
that  the  men  inside  of  the  customs  and 
the  clothes  do  not  change  much  from  age 
to  age. 

Without  going  deeper  into  this  matter 
of  ethics,  it  suffices  here  to  state  that  the 
placard  issued  by  the  States  General  gave 
the  Amsterdam  ring  what  it  wanted— 
but  with  a  commendably  greater  dignity 
of  expression  than  usually  is  found  in  the 

23 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

legislative  acts  affecting  "  cities  of  the  first 
class"  which  issue  from  Albany  to-day. 
The  charging  points  of  that  famous  pla- 
card are  as  follows:  "Whereas,  we  un- 
derstand that  it  would  be  honourable  ser- 
viceable and  profitable  to  this  Country, 
and  for  the  promotion  of  its  prosperity, 
as  well  as  for  the  maintenance  of  sea- 
faring people,  that  the  good  Inhabitants 
should  be  excited  and  encouraged  to  em- 
ploy and  to  occupy  themselves  in  seeking 
out  and  discovering  Passages,  Havens, 
Countries,  and  Places  that  have  not  be- 
fore now  been  discovered  nor  frequented ; 
and  being  informed  by  some  Traders  that 
they  intend,  with  God's  merciful  help, 
by  diligence  labour  danger  and  expense, 
to  employ  themselves  thereat,  as  they 
expect  to  derive  a  handsome  profit  there- 
from, if  it  pleased  Us  to  privilege  charter 
and  favour  them  that  they  alone  might 
24 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

resort  and  sail  to  and  frequent  the  pas- 
sages havens  countries  and  places  to  be 
by  them  newly  found  and  discovered  for 
six  voyages,  as  a  compensation  for  their 
outlays  trouble  and  risk.  .  .  .  Therefore: 
We,  having  duly  weighed  the  aforesaid 
matter,  and  finding,  as  hereinbefore 
stated,  the  said  undertaking  to  be  laud- 
able honourable  and  serviceable  for  the 
prosperity  of  the  United  Provinces,  and 
wishing  that  the  experiment  be  free  and 
open  to  all  and  every  of  the  inhabitants 
of  this  country  ...  do  hereby  grant  and 
consent  that  whosoever  from  now  hence- 
forward shall  discover  any  new  Passages 
Havens  Countries  or  Places  shall  alone 
resort  to  the  same  or  cause  them  to  be 
frequented  for  four  voyages,  without  any 
other  person  directly  or  indirectly  sailing 
frequenting  or  resorting  from  the  United 
Netherlands  to  the  said  newly  discovered 
25 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

and  found  passages  havens  countries  or 
places  until  the  first  discoverer  and  find- 
er shall  have  made,  or  caused  to  be  made, 
the  said  four  voyages :  on  pain  of  confis- 
cation of  the  goods  and  ships  wherewith 
the  contrary  attempt  shall  be  made,  and 
a  fine  of  Fifty  thousand  Netherland  Duc- 
ats, to  the  profit  of  the  aforesaid  finder 
or  discoverer." 

It  would  seem  from  the  foregoing  that 
the  Amsterdam  men  asked  for  six  voyages 
and  were  granted  four :  even  as  at  Albany 
"  a  strike  "  nowadays  is  so  made  that  the 
Assembly  may  manifest  a  fine  faithful- 
ness to  the  public  interests  by  cutting 
it  down  handsomely — and  still  give  the 
" strikers"  all  they  want.  Again  I  may 
observe  that  in  this  energetic  piece  of 
legislation  —  obviously  rushed  through 
that  older  Assembly  by  powerful  private 
interest — there  is  no  very  pointed  mani- 
26 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

festation  of  the  Dutch  sleepiness  upon 
which  Irving  so  freely  descants. 

Indeed,  as  I  have  already  stated,  and 
as  I  shall  state  more  at  length  presently, 
the  Dutch  showed  a  most  lively  eagerness 
during  the  years  immediately  following 
Hudson's  discovery  to  seize  upon  and 
to  develop  the  North  American  trade. 
Broadly,  they  sought  to  capture  that 
trade  before  it  fell  into  the  hands  of 
other  nations.  Narrowly,  they  sought  to 
wrest  it  from  one  another — as  may  be 
seen  in  the  fierce  contention  for  trading 
privileges  which  went  on  among  them- 
selves. Petitions  and  counter -petitions 
for  trading  rights  pestered  the  local  as- 
semblies of  the  states  and  the  States 
General.  One  large  company  was  formed 
to  take,  and  for  a  time  did  take,  the 
whole  of  the  American  contract.  There 
was  a  constant  wrangling  that  disturbed 
27 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

the  land.  Partly  to  quiet  that  wrangling, 
but  more  to  serve  high  national  interests, 
measures  at  last  were  taken  which  put  an 
end  to  all  rivalries  (other  than  with  out- 
siders) by  creating  a  single  powerful  cor- 
poration to  which  was  granted  all  trad- 
ing right  to  America. 


IV 


VERY  great  principles  of  religion  and 
of  state,  along  with  other  principles 
of  a  strictly  commonplace  selfish  sort,  lay 
at  the  root  of  the  founding  of  the  Dutch 
West  India  Company.  In  a  grand  way, 
that  Company  was  intended  to  win  free- 
dom for  the  Netherlands  by  smashing  the 
power  of  Spain.  In  a  less  grand  way — 
but  in  a  way  that  never  was  lost  sight  of 
— it  was  intended  to  line  the  pockets  of 
the  practical  patriots  who  were  its  stock- 
holders. On  its  larger  lines,  as  an  in- 
strument of  justice,  and  incidentally  as  an 
instrument  of  personal  and  political  re- 
venge, it  was  to  a  great  extent  a  success. 
On  its  smaller  lines,  as  a  commercial  in- 
29 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

vestment,  it  was  a  ruinous  failure.  We 
of  New  York  are  none  the  better  for  its 
success,  and  we  distinctly  are  the  worse 
for  its  failure.  That  failure  gave  this  city 
a  bad  start. 

William  Usselincx,  the  originator  of  the 
Company,  and  for  thirty  years  its  most 
persistent  promoter,  was  one  of  the  half 
million  or  so  of  Protestant  Belgians  who 
were  driven  to  take  refuge  in  Holland 
by  Spanish  persecution.  As  an  Antwerp 
merchant,  under  Spanish  rule,  he  had 
traded  to  America;  and  so  had  come  to 
know  that  the  colonies  whence  Spain 
drew  her  main  revenues  were  at  once  her 
strength  and  her  weakness.  He  realized 
that  those  colonies,  widely  scattered  and 
individually  ill-defended,  were  secure  only 
because  they  were  not  attacked;  and  he 
farther  realized  that  even  a  small  naval 
force,  resolutely  handled,  could  give  a 
30 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

good  account  of  the  treasure-fleets  which 
sailed  annually  from  America  to  Spain. 
His  simple  plan,  developed  from  those 
conditions,  was  to  seize  and  to  sack  the 
richer  cities  of  the  Spanish  islands  and  the 
Spanish  main,  and  to  capture  such  plate- 
ships  as  could  be  caught  conveniently 
upon  the  sea — with  the  immediate  result 
of  a  very  satisfactory  return  in  cash  from 
his  sackings  and  capturings,  and  with  an 
ultimate  result  of  a  greater  and  more  far- 
reaching  sort.  On  that  larger  side  was 
patriotism.  His  great  purpose  was  to 
cripple  Spain  by  seizing  her  revenues  at 
their  source,  and  still  farther  to  cripple 
her  by  breaking  her  line  of  communica- 
tion with  that  source :  both  by  the  actual 
capture  of  her  treasure-laden  ships,  and 
by  the  threat  of  capture  that  would  make 
Spanish  ship-masters  fearful  of  their  voy- 
age. The  threat  was  a  potent  one.  In 

31 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK' 

our  own  day,  when  the  Alabama  was 
afloat,  we  have  seen  what  such  a  threat, 
backed  by  only  a  ship  or  two,  will  do  to 
wreck  the  commerce  of  a  nation  by  driv- 
ing its  vessels  to  the  shelter  of  foreign 
flags.  In  those  large  days  of  hard  fight- 
ing refuge  under  a  foreign  flag  was  a 
thing  unknown.  Spain  had  no  choice  but 
to  stand  up  and  take  Dutch  punishment 
until — and  that  was  intended  to  be  the 
glorious  ending  of  the  struggle  —  she 
should  be  so  weakened  that  her  hold 
upon  the  Netherlands  could  be  broken 
for  good  and  all. 

It  was  about  the  year  1592  that  Ussel- 
incx  broached  his  heroic  project  for  or- 
ganizing that  private  military  corporation 
which  anticipated  by  almost  precisely 
three  centuries  Mr.  Stockton's  "  Great 
War  Syndicate  " :  an  association  of  finan- 
ciers who,  in  a  strictly  business  way,  were 
32 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

to  expel  the  Spaniards  from  the  Nether- 
lands— and  who  were  to  net  upon  the 
transaction  a  profit  of  from  fifty  to  one 
hundred  per  cent.  Also,  it  was  on  busi- 
ness lines  that  his  project  was  opposed — 
but  with  a  mingling  in  the  opposition  of 
considerations  of  classes  and  of  creeds. 
The  destruction  by  the  Spaniards  of  the 
commerce  of  Antwerp  had  thrown  a  large 
part  of  that  commerce  to  Rotterdam  and 
Amsterdam.  It  was  asking  a  good  deal, 
therefore,  to  ask  the  Dutch  to  take  a 
hand  in  a  venture  that  would  bring  them 
to  grips  with  the  strongest  State  in  the 
world;  and  that  would  have  for  its  out- 
come, if  successful,  the  return  of  the 
Belgian  refugees  in  triumph  to  their  own 
country  to  re-establish  —  at  the  cost  of 
their  Dutch  allies — their  lost  trade  on  the 
Scheldt.  John  of  Barneveldt,  as  a  states- 
man— perhaps  as  a  somewhat  narrow- 

3  33 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

minded  statesman — opposed  the  Belgian 
plan.  Behind  him  were  the  town  aris- 
tocracies of  birth  and  of  wealth,  the 
advocates  of  republicanism,  the  Armin- 
ians.  The  Belgians  had  for  allies  the 
lower  classes  in  the  towns  of  Holland,  the 
monarchists,  the  strict  Calvinists,  and  for 
a  rallying  centre  the  House  of  Orange— 
the  head  of  which  great  House,  taking  a 
strictly  personal  interest  in  the  matter, 
played  always  and  only  for  his  own  hand. 
The  two  great  parties  then  formed  last- 
ed intact  until  the  French  Revolution, 
and  are  not  extinct  even  now.  For 
thirty  years  the  fight  between  them — 
broadly  on  the  Belgian  matter,  but  with 
many  side  issues — was  waged  vigorously. 
In  the  first  acute  stage  of  the  struggle, 
1607-1609,  the  main  issues  were  war  or 
truce  or  peace  with  Spain — and  the  threat 
implied  by  Usselincx's  project  had  much 
34 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

to  do  with  compelling  Spain  to  accept 
the  humiliating  twelve  years'  truce  that 
was  signed  in  the  year  1609.  In  the 
second  acute  stage,  1617-1619,  the  main 
issue  was  theological:  the  fight  for  su- 
premacy between  the  Calvinists  and  the 
Arminians.  That  fight  ended,  on  May 
13,  1619,  with  the  execution  of  Barne- 
veldt.  Then  Usselincx's  plan  was  taken 
up  in  good  earnest:  with  the  result  that 
things  began  to  move  forward  briskly 
toward  the  founding  of  New  York. 

I  confess  that  there  is  a  suggestion  of 
anticlimax  in  treating  as  mere  incidents 
of  that  great  struggle  the  wrecking  of 
the  power  of  Spain  and  the  winning  of 
freedom  for  the  United  Netherlands ;  and 
as  its  culmination  nothing  more  stirring 
than  the  establishment  of  a  fur-traders' 
camp  on  a  lonely  islet  nooked  in  the 
waters  of  an  almost  unknown  land.  But 
35 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

I  protest  that,  for  my  present  purposes, 
the  most  important  result  which  flowed 
from  the  rise  of  the  Dutch  Republic  pre- 
cisely was  the  establishment  of  that  fur- 
traders'  camp. 


V 


JUST  the  same  human  nature  that  still 
is  in  use  showed  itself  in  the  fight  that 
went  on  in  the  Low  Countries  during 
those  strenuous  thirty  years.  That  much 
is  made  clear  by  the  records  of  the  states 
of  Holland  and  of  West  Vriesland — where 
the  Belgian  party  was  strongest — and  by 
the  records  of  the  States  General.  But 
the  spicy  personal  details  of  the  conflict, 
being  hid  in  the  phrases  "  divers  mer- 
chants" and  "divers  traders,"  are  lost. 

On  June  21,  1614,  when  the  light 
sparring  of  the  second  round  was  be- 
ginning, a  petition  of  "divers  traders  of 
these  provinces"  was  presented  to  the 
States  General  praying  for  power  to  form 

37 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

"  a  general  Company  for  the  West  Indies, 
the  coast  of  Africa,  and  through  the 
Straits  of  Magellan."  The  petition  was 
ordered  to  lie  over  for  four  weeks,  to  the 
end  that  "their  High  Mightinesses  may 
thoroughly  examine  the  matter  " ;  but  its 
opponents — by  means  which  were  not  re- 
corded in  the  minutes — managed  to  keep 
it  in  committee  for  more  than  two  months. 
It  did  come  up  again,  however,  on  the 
25th  of  August;  and  so  vigorously  that 
the  Assembly  voted  "that  the  business 
of  forming  a  general  West  India  Com- 
pany shall  be  undertaken  to-morrow 
morning."  Again  the  opposition  got  in 
some  fine  work — and  the  business  was  not 
undertaken  on  that  "  to-morrow  morn- 
ing" of  nearly  three  hundred  years  ago. 
It  was  adjourned  until  September  2d.  On 
that  day  the  two  parties  came  to  a  clinch 
— that  ended  for  the  Belgian  party  in  a 
38 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

clean  fall.  During  the  morning  the  Bel- 
gians clearly  had  the  lead,  and  the  As- 
sembly resolved  "that  the  affair  of  the 
West  India  Company  shall  be  continued 
this  afternoon."  But  it  wasn't — and  be- 
fore the  West  India  Company  was  found- 
ed that  momentary  stoppage  had  stretch- 
ed out  into  nine  years.  Very  interesting 
would  be  the  record — if  it  existed,  and 
if  we  could  get  at  it — of  what  happened 
that  day  at  The  Hague  after  the  morning 
session  of  the  Assembly  stood  adjourned! 
Having  no  record  to  go  by,  we  can  only 
make  guesses :  being  guided  a  little  in  our 
guessing  by  knowledge  of  what  has  hap- 
pened at  Albany,  between  two  sessions 
of  another  Assembly,  in  later  times. 

A  little  light  is  thrown  on  the  situation 
by  an  act  passed  (September  27,  1614)  by 
the  states  of  Holland  and  West  Vries- 
land:  in  which  is  the  pointed  suggestion 

39 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

that  under  cover  of  a  general  company 
"some  may  secretly  endeavor  to  pursue 
trade  to  Guinea  ...  in  case  the  trade 
to  other  countries  should  .  .  .  happen  to 
fail,  to  be  interrupted,  or  to  cease." 
Possibly,  then,  the  Dutch  slave-traders 
had  a  hand  in  "  knifing  "  the  bill  that  day. 
Some  measures  in  our  own  Congress  were 
" knifed"  by  the  slave-holding  interest 
much  less  than  three  centuries  ago.  Also, 
it  is  fair  to  assume  that  the  promoters  of 
the  New  Netherland  Company  had  much 
to  do  with  the  "  knifing. ' '  Certainly,  that 
Company  was  chartered  only  a  little  more 
than  a  month  after  the  West  India  Com- 
pany went  by  the  board. 

Among  the  members  of  the  New 
Netherland  Company  were  Hans  Hongers, 
Paulus  Pelgrom,  and  Lambrecht  van 
Tweenhuysen,  owners  of  the  ships  Tiger 
and  Fortune — and  therefore  the  owners 
40 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

of  the  yacht  Onrust:  and  the  major  claim 
on  which  they  rested  their  request  for 
special  trading  privileges  was  their  right 
to  benefit  from  the  discoveries  that  had 
resulted  from  the  little  yacht's  voyage. 
To  that  Company  the  States  General 
granted  a  charter  (October  n,  1614) 
which  gave  an  exclusive  right  "  to  resort 
to,  or  cause  to  be  frequented,  the  afore- 
said newly  discovered  countries  situate 
in  America  between  New  France  and  Vir- 
ginia, the  sea  coasts  whereof  lie  in  the 
Latitude  of  from  forty  to  forty  five  de- 
grees, now  named  New  Netherland,  as  is 
to  be  seen  by  a  Figurative  Map  hereunto 
annexed ;  and  that  for  four  Voyages  with- 
in the  term  of  three  years,  commencing 
the  first  January  1615  next  coming,  or 
sooner." 

In   that   document   the   name    "  New 
Netherland"  first  was  used  officially;  and 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

was  used,  to  quote  Mr.  Brodhead,  to 
designate  the  "unoccupied  regions  of 
America  lying  between  Virginia  and  Can- 
ada by  a  name  which  they  continued  to 
bear  for  half  a  century — until,  in  the  full- 
ness of  time,  right  gave  way  to  power 
and  the  Dutch  colony  of  New  Netherland 
became  the  English  province  of  New 
York." 

The  question  of  title  that  Mr.  Brodhead 
raises  in  this  loose  statement  of  fact  is  far 
too  large  a  question  to  be  dealt  with  here. 
But  it  is  only  fair  to  add  that  his  hot  con- 
tention that  the  Dutch  had  a  just  right  to 
their  North  American  holding  is  denied 
with  equal  heat  by  a  Dutch  authority. 
The  peppery  Dr.  Asher  —  in  his  life  of 
Hudson,  prepared  for  the  Hakluyt  Society 
— disposes  of  the  claims  of  his  own  coun- 
trymen in  these  words:  "The  [Dutch] 
title  itself  was  little  better  than  a  shadow. 
42 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

It  was  entirely  founded  on  the  boldest, 
the  most  obstinate,  and  the  most  ex- 
tensive act  of  'squatting'  recorded  in 
colonial  history.  The  territory  called 
New  Netherland,  which  the  West  India 
Company  claimed  on  account  of  Hudson's 
discovery,  belonged  by  the  best  possible 
right  to  England.  It  formed  part  of  a 
vast  tract  of  country,  the  coast  of  which 
had  been  first  discovered  by  English 
ships,  on  which  settlements  had  been 
formed  by  English  colonists,  and  which 
had  been  publicly  claimed  by  England, 
and  granted  to  an  English  company  be- 
fore Hudson  ever  set  foot  on  American 
ground.  But  the  wilds  and  wastes  of 
primeval  forests  were  thought  of  so  little 
value  that  the  Dutch  were  for  many  years 
allowed  to  encroach  upon  English  rights, 
without  more  than  passing  remonstrance 
of  the  British  government." 
43 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

It  is  my  duty  to  state  the  clashing 
opinions  of  these  two  fiery  historians ;  but 
I  have  not  the  effrontery  to  discuss  the 
question  on  which,  so  signally,  they  are 
at  odds.  Nor  is  discussion  necessary. 
Most  happily,  that  once  burning  question 
was  quieted  by  the  Treaty  of  Breda 
(1667)  and  has  been  a  dead  issue  for 
more  than  two  hundred  years. 

In  the  end,  as  I  have  written,  Usselincx 
and  the  Belgians  won  through.  When 
John  of  Barneveldt's  head  ceased  to  be 
associated  with  his  body — the  equities  of 
that  detachment  need  not  here  be  dis- 
cussed— opposition  to  the  founding  of  the 
West  India  Company  came  to  an  end. 
The  actual  establishment  of  the  Com- 
pany had  to  be  postponed  until  the  ex- 
piration of  the  truce  with  Spain;  but 
matters  immediately  were  set  in  train 
for  it,  and  in  the  year  1621,  upon  the 
44 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

renewal  of  hostilities,  the  act  of  incor- 
poration (June  3d)  was  passed. 

Under  the  terms  of  the  charter — which, 
as  Mr.  Brodhead  puts  it,  "  created  a  sort 
of  marine  principality  with  sovereign 
rights  on  foreign  shores"-— the  Company 
was  granted  exclusive  rights  to  trade  on 
the  coasts  of  Africa  between  the  Tropic 
of  Cancer  and  the  Cape  of  Good  Hope; 
to  the  West  Indies;  and  to  the  coast  of 
America  between  New  Foundland  and 
the  Straits  of  Magellan:  with  power  to 
make  treaties,  to  found  colonies  within 
those  limits,  to  appoint  governors  over 
such  colonies,  to  administer  justice  in 
them,  and  to  raise  a  military  force  for 
their  defence.  Farther,  the  States  Gen- 
eral engaged  to  defend  the  Company 
against  every  person  in  free  navigation 
and  traffic;  to  "  assist "  it  with  a  grant  of 
a  million  guilders;  and  to  give  it  sixteen 

45 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

warships — that  the  Company  was  to  man 
and  to  equip,  and  to  match  by  raising  an 
equal  naval  force  of  its  own:  the  whole 
fleet  to  be  under  the  command  of  an 
admiral  whom  the  States  General  should 
name.  Also,  the  States  General  reserved 
the  right  to  confirm  or  to  reject  the 
governors  nominated  by  the  Company, 
and  to  exercise  a  general  control  of  its 
affairs. 

Thus,  at  last,  the  Dutch  West  India 
Company  was  launched.  Had  Irving 
touched  upon  its  history  he  probably 
would  have  attributed  the  long  delay  to 
Dutch  sleepiness;  and  would  have  given 
us  many  neatly-turned  pleasantries  about 
the  number  of  pipes  smoked  drowsily, 
and  about  the  drowsy  talk  that  went  on 
for  thirty  years  between  those  stolid 
Dutch  statesmen  and  those  stolid  Dutch 
financiers — all  of  which  would  have  been 
46 


M  !>* 

o    2 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

vastly  amusing,  but  would  have  left  some- 
thing on  the  side  of  fact  to  be  desired. 

There  was  substantial  cause  for  that 
long   delay.     In   addition   to   the   great 

problems  of  statecraft  that  had  to  be 

/ 

dealt  with,  the  Dutch  were  dealing  with 
a  new  great  project  on  new  great  lines. 
Their  nearest  approach  to  a  precedent 
was  the  East  India  Company:  of  which 
the  primary  purpose — as  trade  went  and 
as  peace  was  understood  in  those  days — 
was  peaceful  trade.  The  primary  pur- 
pose of  the  West  India  Company  was 
war.  Its  main  dividends  were  expected 
to  come  from,  and  eventually  did  come 
from,  the  capture  of  Spanish  treasure. 
But  provision  had  to  be  made  for  earn- 
ing money  in  between  whiles — during  the 
close  season  for  treasure -hunting  —  by 
employing  its  armed  fleet  in  ordinary 
trade:  in  carrying  cargoes  of  slaves  and 
47 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

peltries  and  other  general  merchandise 
of  the  times.  And  at  every  turn  con- 
flicting interests,  political  and  commer- 
cial, had  to  be  reconciled  and  brought 
into  line.  Nowadays  a  half-dozen  cor- 
poration lawyers  would  get  together  and 
would  organize  such  a  company  in  a  fort- 
night; and  in  another  fortnight — under 
the  New  Jersey  general  corporation  act 
— it  would  have  its  charter  and  would  be 
established  as  a  going  concern.  But  we 
do  these  things  quickly  now — being  also 
freed  from  the  trammels  of  state  policy 
— because  we  have  precedents  in  abun- 
dance to  work  by,  and  because  we  have 
the  tools  to  work  with  (I  use  the  phrase 
with  a  broad  impersonality)  lying  ready 
to  our  hands.  To  take  a  strictly  legal 
parallel:  any  little  seventeenth-century 
English  conveyancer  was  able  to  get  the 
weather-gauge  of  the  Statute  of  Uses  after 
48 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

Orlando  Bridgman  had  shown  him  how. 
Yet  sleepiness — whatever  may  be  said  of 
its  slowness — never  has  been  suggested 
as  a  distinguishing  characteristic  of  the 
seventeenth  -  century  English  bar.  Nor 
were  the  Dutch  of  that  century  sleepy. 
They  were  very  wide  awake  indeed. 

One  other  point  in  the  making  of  the 
West  India  Company  I  must  touch  upon. 
With  the  sincere  immodesty  that  is  not 
the  least  marked  of  our  civic  traits,  we 
of  New  York  are  accustomed  to  believe 
that  that  Company  was  organized  and 
chartered  mainly  for  the  purpose  of  ex- 
ploiting our  own  New  Netherland.  Act- 
ually, the  part  that  our  little  island  (and 
its  dependent  continent)  had  in  that  large 
piece  of  statecraft  was  microscopic:  as 
we  realize  when  we  consider  the  great 
elements — rival  trade  interests,  contend- 
ing factions,  warring  creeds — which  were 

4  49 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

combined  in  it  under  the  strangely  blend- 
ed pressure  of  sordid  selfishness  and  lofty 
patriotism  and  hot  revenge.  Looked  at 
in  that  way,  there  is  nothing  in  the  his- 
tory of  the  Company  to  stir  our  vanity. 
But  looked  at  in  another  way,  even  our 
vanity  has  its  consolations.  Although  the 
splendid  part  that  the  Company  took  in 
fighting  to  a  glorious  finish  the  glorious 
fight  that  Holland  put  up  with  Spain  is 
not  forgotten,  its  share  of  honor  in  a  way 
is  lost:  being  merged  into,  and  almost 
indistinguishably  blended  with,  the  na- 
tional honor  which  the  Dutch  won  by  a 
victory  that  instantly  benefited,  and  that 
still  continues  to  benefit,  the  whole  civ- 
ilized world.  But  the  Company  shared 
with  no  one  the  glory  of  planting  the  city 
of  New  Amsterdam,  that  in  time's  fulness 
was  to  be  the  city  of  New  York — nor  had 
it,  I  venture  incidentally  to  assert,  the 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

least  notion  that  out  of  that  trifling 
colonial  venture  any  glory  ever  would 
come.  Yet  that  most  minor  of  all  its 
accomplishments  is  precisely  the  accom- 
plishment that  has  kept  green  its  mem- 
ory; that  will  continue  to  keep  green  its 
memory  as  long  as  New  York  endures. 

I  hasten  to  add  that  we  owe  the  Com- 
pany no  thanks.  What  it  did  for  the 
making  of  our  city  was  done  badly — and 
the  very  founding  of  it  was  barely  more 
than  a  mere  by  -  blow  of  chance.  In 
point  of  fact,  the  nearest  approach  to 
naming  New  Netherland  in  the  Com- 
pany's charter  was  the  permissive  clause 
referring  to  the  colonization  of  "fruitful 
and  unsettled  lands."  At  least,  the  de- 
scription is  recognizable.  While  Man- 
hattan no  longer  is  unsettled,  it  certainly 
is  fruitful  still. 

5* 


VI 


EVEN  before  the  West  India  Com- 
pany was  organized  the  germ  of  the 
destruction  of  Dutch  rule  in  North  Amer- 
ica had  taken  form.  In  November  1620 
the  patent  had  passed  the  Great  Seal  by 
which  King  James  granted  to  the  Plym- 
outh Company  "an  absolute  property 
in  all  the  American  territory  extending 
from  the  fortieth  to  the  forty-eighth  de- 
gree of  latitude  and  from  the  Atlantic  to 
the  Pacific."  That  large-handed  grant 
was  qualified,  to  be  sure,  by  the  proviso 
that  colonies  might  not  be  planted  in  any 
region  "actually  possessed  or  inhabited 
by  any  other  Christian  prince  or  state  " ; 
but  as  England  refused  to  acknowledge 
52 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

that  the  Dutch  had  any  possessions  be- 
tween the  Virginia  and  the  New  England 
plantations,  and  as  the  English  ambas- 
sador in  Holland,  Sir  Dudley  Carleton, 
lodged  (February  9,  1622)  a  formal  pro- 
test against  the  planting  of  the  New 
Netherland  colony,  that  proviso  was  no 
more  than  a  politely  turned  phrase.  On 
the  other  hand,  the  States  General  paid 
very  little  attention  to  the  protest,  and 
never  formally  replied  to  it.  However, 
there  it  was  on  the  record ;  and  so  was  in 
readiness  for  use.  But  England  went 
slowly  in  those  days.  Almost  half  a  cen- 
tury passed  before  it  was  used.  Mr. 
Chamberlain  and  Sir  Alfred  Milner  were 
quicker  in  getting  from  cause  to  conse- 
quence a  couple  of  years  or  so  ago. 

While  the  ambassadors  talked  —  or 
maintained  a  discreet  but  aggravating 
silence — the  merchants  acted.  In  the 

53 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

years  while  the  West  India  Company  was 
in  course  of  formation  the  foundation  of 
the  sea- wealth  of  New  York  was  laid. 
The  Dutch  planted  their  trading-post  on 
the  island  of  Manhattan  because  the 
many  water-ways  which  came  together 
there  obviously  made  it  a  good  place  for 
trade  with  the  interior  of  the  country. 
As  exploration  continued,  the  fact  was 
demonstrated  that  it  not  only  was  a  good 
place  but  that  it  absolutely  was  the  best 
place  for  trade  on  the  coast  of  North 
America:  that  there  was  no  other  such 
great  land-locked  harbor,  which  at  once 
was  near  to  the  sea,  easily  open  to  it,  and 
free  from  the  dangers  of  outlying  reefs 
and  shoals ;  that  nowhere  else — and  this 
fact  continued  to  count  first  with  us  un- 
til the  time  of  railroads — was  there  any 
such  system  of  interior  water-ways  as 
that  which  made  the  Sandy  Hook  Chan- 
54 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

nel  the  inlet  to  the  trade  of  a  vast  part, 
and  a  vastly  rich  part,  of  the  continent. 
Therefore  the  Dutch  shallops  went  and 
came  on  our  thirteen  rivers — and  beyond 
the  shallop  service,  plying  in  the  upper 
reaches  of  those  rivers  and  in  countless 
minor  streams,  was  a  still  farther-reach- 
ing service  of  canoes.  And  all  of  that 
trade  ebbed  from  and  flowed  to  this  island 
of  Manhattan:  where  the  round-bellied 
Dutch  ships  linked  it  with  and  made  it  a 
part  of  the  commerce  of  the  world.  Even 
a  minor  prophet,  with  those  geographical 
facts  in  his  possession,  would  not  have 
hesitated  to  prophesy  a  great  future  for 
such  a  seaport  with  such  a  hold  upon  the 
land. 

When  the  West  India  Company  came 

into  existence  it  therefore  had  among  its 

assets — although  ignored  in  its  chartered 

list  of  assets — a  little  trading-post  that 

55 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

was  in  the  way  of  promotion  to  be  the 
capital  of  a  flourishing  colony,  had  there 
been  manifested  even  a  very  small 
amount  of  common  sense  and  common 
justice  in  the  management  of  its  affairs. 
And  at  the  beginning — being  stimulated 
to  wise  action,  perhaps,  by  the  English 
assertion  of  a  counter  claim  to  their 
American  possessions — the  Company  did 
go  at  the  planting  of  New  Netherland 
with  a  certain  show  of  energy,  and  on 
lines  of  broader  policy  than  were  called 
for  by  the  mere  requirements  of  trade. 

Upon  the  completion  of  the  Com- 
pany's organization  the  management  of 
the  affairs  of  New  Netherland  were  con- 
fided by  the  Directorate,  the  Council  of 
XIX.,  to  the  Chamber  of  Amsterdam — 
whence  came  the  name  that  was  given  to 
the  settlement  on  Manhattan  Island — 
and  by  that  Chamber  the  first  ship-load 
56 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

of  colonists,  thirty  families,  was  despatch- 
ed from  the  Texel  in  the  ship  New  Nether- 
land  in  March  1623.  Making  their  course 
to  the  westward  by  a  long  reach  into  the 
south — as  was  the  habit  of  the  Dutch 
navigators,  who  ever  were  fearful  of  North 
Atlantic  storms — they  touched  at  the 
Canaries  and  at  Guiana,  and  then  beat 
up  the  coast  to  Sandy  Hook  and  made 
their  harbor  early  in  May.  (Possibly  our 
otherwise  unaccounted-for  custom  of  May- 
day movings  had  its  origin  in  their  arrival 
about  May-day,  and  the  consequent  run- 
ning of  their  yearly  tenures  from  that 
date.)  They  were  of  good  stuff,  those 
colonists — mostly  Walloons,  very  eager 
to  get  away  from  European  religious  in- 
tolerance for  good  and  all.  Their  coming 
marks  the  real  founding  of  New  York. 
They  were  the  first  Europeans  who  came 
to  dwell  upon  this  island  with  the  inten- 

57 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

tion  of  spending  their  lives  here;  and,  in 
the  end — though  that  part  of  their  inten- 
tion was  understood  rather  than  stated — 
of  making  themselves  permanently  a  part 
of  it  by  being  buried  in  its  soil. 

Meantime,  by  way  of  fortifying  the 
situation  politically,  the  States  General 
erected  into  a  Province  the  West  India 
Company's  comet  -  like  holding  —  which 
had  a  tiny  material  head  upon  the  sea- 
board, and  a  vast  vaporous  tail  that  ex- 
tended vaguely  across  the  continent  west- 
ward—  and  gave  it,  as  a  Province,  the 
heraldic  rank  and  bearings  of  a  Count. 

Then  it  was  that  our  beloved  Beaver 
came  to  us :  the  same  worthy  animal  who 
still  figures  gallantly  in  the  arms  of  the 
city  of  New  York.  As  we  first  received 
him,  he  was  the  single  charge — "  a  bea- 
ver proper"  —  upon  our  shield,  above 
which  a  count's  coronet  was  our  crest. 
58 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

Later,  when  new  civic  arms  were  granted 
to  us  by  the  English  Crown — in  the  time 
of  great  commercial  prosperity  that  fol- 
lowed upon  the  passage  of  the  Bolting  Act 
—he  modestly  joined  the  wind-mill  sails 
and  the  flour  -  barrels,  and  so  became  a 
mere  beaver  "  in  chief  and  in  base."  And 
there  he  remains  to  this  day:  in  lasting 
memorial  of  the  fact  that  the  foundation 
of  the  sea- wealth  of  this  city  was  laid  in 
its  trade  in  furs. 


VII 

AT  the  outset,  the  venture  undertaken 
by  the  West  India  Company  was  a 
profitable  one:  not  on  the  side  of  trade, 
but  on  the  side  of  war.  Three  great 
successes  marked  the  first  ten  years  of 
the  Company's  existence:  the  taking  of 
Bahia  (1624),  the  capture  of  the  treas- 
ure fleet  (1628),  and  the  reduction  of 
Pernambuco  (1630).  Of  those  three 
events,  although  the  Brazilian  conquests 
counted  for  more  in  the  long  run,  the 
capture  of  the  plate-ships  naturally  made 
the  strongest  impression  upon  the  popular 
mind.  Indeed,  that  magnificent  cash  re- 
turn upon  invested  patriotism  is  talked 
about  relishingly  in  Holland  even  until 
60 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

this  present  day.  And  it  is  not  sur- 
prising. Never  has  there  been  such  a 
bag  of  treasure  in  modern  times!  Ad- 
miral Peter  Heyn,  leaving  out  of  the 
account  the  vessels  which  he  sunk  with 
their  treasure  in  them,  brought  home  to 
Holland  seventeen  galleons  laden  with 
bullion  and  merchandise  valued,  accord- 
ing to  Dr.  Asher,  at  more  than  fourteen — 
or,  according  to  the  more  conservative 
Mr.  Brodhead,  at  more  than  twelve  mill- 
ions of  guilders;  and  the  Dutch  guilder 
of  that  period,  it  must  be  remembered, 
had  a  purchasing  value  not  much  less 
than  that  of  our  dollar  of  to-day.  Ei- 
ther estimate  is  prodigious — and  on  the 
strength  of  those  huge  winnings  the  Com- 
pany declared  upon  its  paid-up  capital  a 
dividend  variously  estimated  by  the  same 
authorities  at  fifty  and  at  seventy-five 
per  cent.  Neither  the  Standard  Oil  Com- 
61 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

pany   nor   the   Steel   Trust   as   yet   has 
equalled  that! 

But  it  was  not  a  wholesome  sort  of 
money  -  making.  "  Successful  war  thus 
poured  infatuating  wealth  into  the  treas- 
ury of  the  West  India  Company,"  is  the 
view  that  Mr.  Brodhead  takes  of  it ;  and 
he  adds  that  when,  in  the  ensuing  year, 
the  King  of  Spain  made  overtures  to  re- 
new the  truce  "the  pride,  the  avarice, 
and  the  religious  sentiment  of  Holland 
were  united  in  continuing  the  war." 
Against  the  truce  the  Company  addressed 
to  the  States  General  (November  16, 
1629)  a  formal  remonstrance.  "  We  have 
at  present,"  declared  the  remonstrants, 
"over  one  hundred  full-rigged  ships  of 
various  burdens  at  sea  .  .  .  manned  by 
fifteen  thousand  seamen  and  soldiers  and 
armed  with  over  four  hundred  metal 
pieces  .  .  .  and  over  two  thousand  swiv- 
62 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

els,  beside  pedereros  to  the  number  of 
far  beyond  six  hundred."  That  fleet  had 
not  sailed  the  seas,  nor  was  it  intended 
to  sail  the  seas,  for  mere  amusement — as 
the  remonstrants  implied  by  adding  that 
"  during  some  consecutive  years "  they 
had  "  plundered  the  enemy  and  enriched 
this  country  "  by  bringing  into  it  great 
stores  of  indigo,  sugar,  hides,  cochineal 
and  tobacco;  and,  above  all,  by  bringing 
in  the  captured  galleons — which  contain- 
ed "  so  great  a  treasure  that  never  did  any 
fleet  bring  to  this  or  to  any  other  country 
so  great  a  prize."  And  they  ended  by 
declaring  that  they  had  exhausted  the 
King  of  Spain's  treasury  by  these  various 
appropriations  of  his  property,  and  by 
"  depriving  him  of  so  much  silver,  which 
was  as  blood  from  one  of  the  arteries  of 
his  heart."  But  the  pith  of  their  argu- 
ment was  in  their  assertion — in  which 

63 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

was  more  of  truth  than  they  suspected — 
that  "the  utter  ruin  and  dissolution  of 
this  Company  will  be  the  result  of  the 
present  negotiations  for  a  truce." 

It  was  reasonable  that  the  Company 
should  be  so  hot  for  keeping  on  with  the 
war.  Spanish  treasure-ships  were  to  be 
had  for  the  mere  taking — and  the  Dutch 
found  taking  them  very  easy  work  in- 
deed. It  is  a  curious  fact  that  the 
Spaniards — who  have  done  some  very 
pretty  fighting  at  one  time  and  another 
on  land — never  were  hard  to  whip  at  sea. 
From  the  Armada  down  to  Santiago  their 
naval  record  is  a  shabby  one.  We  ham- 
mered them  pretty  much  as  we  pleased 
in  the  nineteenth  century;  so  did  the 
English  in  the  eighteenth;  so  did  the 
Dutch  in  the  seventeenth — the  time  that 
I  here  am  dealing  with;  and  so,  I  believe 
thoroughly,  would  the  English  have  ham- 
64 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

mered  the  whole  Armada  in  the  sixteenth 
had  they  not  sublet  a  part  of  their  con- 
tract to  the  winds  and  the  waves. 

The  battlings  of  the  Dutch  and  the 
Spaniards  have  a  distinct  place  in  our 
commercial  annals,  because  one  of  their 
direct  results  was  to  check  our  com- 
mercial growth  at  the  start.  The  "in- 
fatuating wealth"  that  poured  in  upon 
the  West  India  Company  tended  to  make 
it  careless  of  the  little  colony  of  New 
Netherland,  and  also  to  make  it  resentful 
of  the  small  return  which  that  colony 
yielded  upon  the  relatively  large  outlay 
required  to  keep  it  in  running  order:  and 
so  led  to  the  adoption  of  the  "  squeezing  " 
policy  which  handicapped  the  trade  of 
the  colonists  and  in  the  end  destroyed 
their  loyalty  and  made  them  welcome  the 
change  to  English  rule.  Mr.  Brodhead 
is  within  the  mark  in  his  observation: 
65 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDI.NG  OF  NEW  YORK 

"  It  was  an  evil  day  for  New  Netherland 
when  the  States  General  committed  to 
the  guardianship  of  a  close  and  grasp- 
ing mercenary  corporation  the  ultimate 
fortunes  of  their  embryo  province  in 
America." 

In  a  report  presented  to  the  States 
General  (October  23,  1629)  the  feeling  of 
the  Company  in  regard  to  its  colony  is 
made  plain.  "The  people  conveyed  by 
us  thither  have  .  .  .  found  but  scanty 
means  of  livelihood  up  to  the  present 
time ;  and  have  not  been  any  profit,  but  a 
drawback,  to  this  Company.  The  trade 
carried  on  there  in  peltries  is  right  ad- 
vantageous; but,  one  year  with  another, 
we  can  at  most  bring  home  fifty  thousand 
guilders." 

Yet  with  that  return,  at  that  time,  the 
Company  should  have  been  well  satis- 
fied. In  The  Planter's  Plea,  published  in 
66 


§_ 

5'   tf 
w     ^ 


3    < 

*   § 
S    3 


f  I 


»a      n 

«•  > 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

London  in  the  year  1630,  the  English 
author  wrote  that  the  colonists  of  New 
Netherland  "appeared  to  subsist  in  a 
comfortable  manner,  and  to  promise  fair- 
ly both  to  the  State  and  to  the  under- 
takers." The  trouble  was  that  "the 
undertakers"  wanted  too  much  and 
wanted  it  too  soon.  In  the  year  1629 
the  population  of  the  colony  could  not 
have  exceeded  three  hundred  and  fifty 
souls ;  and  three  hundred  and  fifty  people 
very  well  might  "subsist  in  comfort"  on 
an  export  trade  of  fifty  thousand  guild- 
ers a  year.  The  Company  in  short,  then 
and  always,  was  greedy.  By  holding  New 
Netherland  as  an  investment  rather  than 
as  a  trust,  by  laying  heavy  imposts  upon 
commerce  in  order  to  raise  dividends,  it 
throttled  the  trade  that  a  less  selfish 
policy  would  have  left  free  to  expand. 
The  one  sort  of  private  ownership  in 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

the  colony  that  was  encouraged — by  the 
granting  of  little  principalities  to  pa- 
troons,  who  were  free  within  certain  lim- 
itations to  trade  on  their  own  account 
— told  directly  against  the  welfare  of  the 
mass  of  the  colonists  by  creating  unfair 
distinctions  of  class.  It  was  a  trans- 
planting of  feudalism  to  America — and 
feudalism  did  not  thrive  in  American 
soil.  Actually,  the  patroonships  were 
bagged  by  an  inside  ring  of  the  Com- 
pany's directors — the  practical  value  of 
being  on  the  ground  floor  was  understood 
in  those  days  quite  as  well  as  we  under- 
stand it  now — and  the  outcome  of  that 
intrinsically  bad  policy  bred  evil  in  two 
ways.  It  created  dissension  in  the  man- 
agement of  the  Company's  affairs  at 
home  by  arraying  inside  private  inter- 
ests against  the  common  interests  of  the 
shareholders  at  large;  and  in  the  colony 
68 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

the  same  private  interests  were  arrayed 
against  the  common  interests  of  the  less- 
favored  colonists.  Later,  the  supply  of 
arms  which  the  savages  obtained  from 
the  patroon  trading  -  posts — but  by  no 
means  only  from  those  sources:  trading 
guns  for  peltries  was  so  profitable  an 
illegal  transaction  that  everybody  was 
keen  to  have  a  hand  in  it — led  on  direct- 
ly to  the  horrors  of  the  Indian  wars. 


VIII 

IN  a  word,  atrociously  bad  government 
was  the  rule  almost  from  the  beginning 
until  quite  the  end  of  the  Dutch  domina- 
tion of  New  Netherland.  Execrable  ad- 
ministration in  Holland  led  to  execrable 
executive  management  in  the  colony. 
Excepting  May  (1624)  and  Verhulst 
(1625),  who  were  little  more  than  factors, 
the  men  sent  out  as  governors  (the  of- 
ficial title  was  Director  General)  wretch- 
edly neglected  or  absolutely  betrayed  the 
interests  which  they  were  sworn  to  serve. 
Kieft  (1638-1646)  was  an  easy  first  in 
that  bad  lot.  He  was  an  ex-bankrupt, 
whose  bankruptcy  had  been  of  such  sort 
that  his  portrait  had  been  hung  up  on  the 
70 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

town  gallows.  Against  him,  unrefuted, 
stood  the  pleasing  charge  of  having  em- 
bezzled ransom -money  intrusted  to  him 
to  rescue  Christian  captives  held  by  the 
Turks.  His  evil  work  in  New  Nether- 
land  culminated  in  his  provocation — by 
a  horrid  and  utterly  inexcusable  massa- 
cre of  savages  —  of  the  terrible  Indian 
war  of  1643:  which  brought  the  colony 
to  the  very  verge  of  ruin,  and  which 
aroused  so  violent  an  outcry  against  him 
on  the  part  of  the  colonists  that  he  was 
recalled.  In  a  way,  justice  was  served 
out  to  him:  he  went  down,  his  sins  with 
him,  in  the  wreck  of  the  ship  in  which  he 
took  passage  for  home.  But  while  Kieft 
holds  the  record  for  worse  than  inca- 
pacity, protests  were  made  by  the 
colonists  against  the  doings  of  every  one 
of  the  Directors — and  always  for  cause. 
Each  of  them  played  first  for  his  own 

71 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

hand.  After  caring  for  himself,  his  care 
was  for  what  remained  of  the  interests 
of  the  Company — and  those  he  either 
muddled  or  marred.  Caring  for  the  in- 
terests of  the  colonists,  in  every  case,  was 
the  last  consideration  of  all.  Under  those 
conditions,  of  necessity,  discontent  was 
chronic  among  the  inhabitants  of  the 
Province  from  first  to  last. 

On  the  other  hand,  I  am  persuaded 
that  an  archangel  would  have  had  his 
work  cut  out  for  him  had  he  tried  to 
govern  at  once  wisely  and  acceptably  the 
hustling,  greedy,  law-defying  Dutchmen 
who  dwelt  in  New  Netherland  two  hun- 
dred and  fifty  years  ago.  By  combining 
the  atrocities  of  the  Congo  Free  State 
under  Lothair's  administration  (paral- 
leled here  by  Kieft's  atrocities)  with 
the  corruption  at  Johannesberg  under 
Kruger's  administration  (paralleled  here 
72 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

by  the  corruption  that  obtained  con- 
tinuously under  Dutch  rule)  we  may  get 
a  fair  notion  of  what  our  few  respectable 
ancestors  on  this  island  had  to  contend 
with,  and  of  what  our  many  unrespect- 
able  ancestors  actually  were. 

The  saving  salt  of  those  days  was 
found  in  the  few  men  who  stood  reso- 
lutely for  good  government  and  for  hon- 
est ways.  They  would  have  been  called 
mugwumps,  had  that  word  then  been 
available  for  use ;  and  no  doubt  they  did 
receive  some  equivalent  derogatory  Dutch 
name.  The  most  exemplary  of  that 
small  but  honorable  company  was  David 
Pietersz  de  Vries:  who  strove  hard  to 
avert  the  Indian  war  waged  by  the  out- 
rageous Kieft,  and  who  stood  as  dis- 
tinctly for  all  that  was  good  in  the  colony 
as  Kieft  stood  for  all  that  was  bad.  Had 
De  Vries  been  appointed  Director,  in- 

73 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

stead  of  Kieft,  we  should  have  been 
saved  from  the  blackest  crime  recorded 
in  our  colonial  history;  and  had  he  been 
continued  in  office,  in  Stuyvesant's  place, 
the  colony  would  not  have  fallen  into 
such  disorder  as  to  give  the  English  a 
mere  walk  -  over  when  their  time  for 
absorbing  it  came.  No  governor  could 
have  prevented  that  absorption.  It  was 
inevitable.  But  the  community  taken 
over  from  De  Vries  would  have  been  far 
sounder  morally  than  was  that  which 
was  taken  over  from  Stuyvesant;  and 
therefore  would  have  been  less  likely  to 
degenerate  into  a  nest  of  pirates  and 
smugglers,  as  it  did  degenerate,  during 
the  first  thirty  years  of  English  rule. 

Precisely  what  sort  of  government  we 

had  here  under  the  governors  appointed 

by  the   West   India   Company  was   set 

forth  with  a  refreshing   candor  in   the 

74 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

famous  Remonstrance — and  in  its  accom- 
panying Memorial  —  presented  by  the 
colonists  to  the  States  General  in  the 
year  1649.  Incidentally,  the  tone  of 
those  documents — which  are  informed  by 
the  petty  spitefulness  of  mean  spirits — 
makes  also  an  ugly  case  against  their 
authors;  and  the  case  is  all  the  stronger 
because  it  is  to  be  read  between  the  lines 
of  their  complainings  and  is  an  alto- 
gether unconscious  arraignment  of  them- 
selves. But  this  fact,  while  it  tends  to 
palliate  the  minor  charges  against  Stuy- 
vesant — whose  high-handed  ways  with 
his  subjects,  and  whose  coarsely  express- 
ed contempt  for  them  "  in  language  better 
befitting  the  fish-market  than  the  Coun- 
cil board,"  probably  were  not  without 
justification — does  not  weaken  the  ma- 
jor charge  of  misgovernment  preferred 
against  him  and  against  the  Company's 
75 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

representatives  generally;  nor  does  it 
lessen  the  reasonableness  of  the  several 
specific  requests  for  reforms  in  law  and 
in  administration  for  which  the  remon- 
strants prayed. 

The  Remonstrance — a  document  that 
fills  forty-four  printed  quarto  pages — is 
a  history  of  the  planting  of  New  Neth- 
erland,  a  description  of  the  country,  a 
statement  of  the  wrongs  suffered  by 
the  colonists,  and  a  prayer  for  certain 
specified  easements  and  reliefs.  It  was 
drawn  up,  presumably,  by  Adriaen  van 
der  Donck.  It  was  signed  by  Van  der 
Donck,  Heermans,  Hardenburg,  Couwen- 
hoven,  Loockermans,  Kip,  Van  Cortlandt, 
Jansen,  Hall,  Elbertsen,  and  Bout.  Three 
of  the  signers,  Van  der  Donck,  Couwen- 
hoven,  and  Bout,  were  delegated  to  take 
it  to  Holland  and  to  lay  it  before  the 
authorities  at  The  Hague. 
76 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

"In  the  infancy  of  this  country"  [wrote  the 
complainants]  "the  Directors  [the  Board  of 
Directors  of  the  West  India  Company]  adopted 
wrong  plans,  and  in  our  opinion  looked  more 
to  their  own  profit  than  to  the  country's  welfare, 
and  trusted  more  to  interested  than  to  sound 
advice.  This  is  evident  from  the  unnecessary 
expenses  incurred  from  time  to  time ;  the  heavy 
accounts  from  New  Netherland;  the  taking 
of  colonies  [land  grants]  by  Directors;  their 
carrying  on  commerce,  to  which  end  trade  has 
been  regulated,  and  finally  from  not  colonizing 
the  country.  .  .  .  Had  the  Honble  West  India 
Company  attended  in  the  beginning  to  popula- 
tion instead  of  incurring  great  expense  for 
things  unnecessary  .  .  .  which  through  bad 
management  and  calculation  came  wholly  to 
little  or  nothing,  notwithstanding  the  excessive 
expenditure  .  .  .  the  place  might  now  be  of 
considerable  importance.  .  .  . 

"Trade,  without  which,  when  lawful,  no  coun- 
try prospers,  has  also  fallen  off  so  much  in 
consequence  of  the  Company's  acts  that  it  is 
without  a  parallel,  and  more  slavish  than  free, 
owing  to  high  duties  and  all  the  inspections  and 
trouble  that  accompany  it.  We  highly  approve 
of  inspection  according  to  the  orders  given  by 

77 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

the  Company  to  its  officers,  and  so  far  as  'tis 
done  to  check  smugglers,  who  have  ruined  the 
country,  and  now  go  out  from  all  parts;  but  it 
ought,  nevertheless,  be  executed  without  par- 
tiality, which  is  not  always  the  case.  The 
duty  is  high ;  of  inspection  and  seizures  there  is 
no  lack,  and  thus  lawful  trade  is  turned  aside 
— except  some  little  which  is  carried  on  only  pro 
forma,  in  order  to  push  smuggling  under  this 
cloak.  Meanwhile  the  Christians  are  treated  al- 
most like  Indians  in  the  purchase  of  necessaries 
which  they  cannot  do  without ;  this  causes  great 
complaint,  distress  and  poverty.  Thus,  for  ex- 
ample :  The  merchants  sell  their  dry  goods,  which 
are  subject  to  little  loss,  at  a  hundred  per  cent, 
advance,  and  that  freely,  according  as  there  is 
a  demand  for,  or  a  scarcity  of,  this  or  that 
article;  petty  traders  who  bring  small  lots  and 
others  who  speculate,  buy  up  those  goods  from 
the  merchants  and  sell  them  again  to  the  com- 
mon people  who  cannot  do  without  them,  often 
at  another  advance  of  cent  per  cent.,  more  or 
less,  according  as  they  are  persuaded  or  dis- 
posed. More  is  taken  on  liquors,  which  are 
subject  to  a  considerable  leakage,  and  .  .  .  the 
goods  are  disposed  by  the  first,  second,  and 
third  hands  at  an  advance  of  .one  and  two 

78 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

hundred  and  more  per  cent.  It  would  be  im- 
possible for  us  to  enumerate  all  the  practices 
that  are  had  recourse  to  for  the  purpose  of 
promoting  self  or  individual  interest;  whilst 
little  thought  is  bestowed  on  introducing  people 
into  the  country.  ...  It  also  has  been  seen 
how  the  letters  of  the  Eight  Men  have  been 
treated,  and  the  result;  besides  many  additional 
orders  and  instructions  which  are  not  known 
to  us,  and  are  alike  ruinous.  But  laying  this 
aside  for  the  present,  with  a  word  now  and 
again  by  way  of  remark,  let  us  proceed  to 
examine  how  their  [the  Company's]  servants, 
and  the  Directors  [of  New  Netherland]  and 
their  friends,  have  fattened  here  from  time  to 
time,  having  played  with  their  employers  and 
the  people  as  the  cat  plays  with  the  mouse. 
.  .  .  We  shall  pass  over  the  beginning  .  .  .  and 
treat  only  of  the  two  last  sad  and  senseless  ex- 
travagances— we  should  say  administrations — 
of  Director  Kieft,  which  is  now  in  truth  past, 
but  its  evil  consequences  remain ;  and  of  Director 
Stuyvesant,  which  still  stands — if  that  can  be 
said  to  stand  which  lies  completely  prostrate. 
.  .  .  Previous  to  Director  Kieft's  bringing  the 
unnecessary  war  upon  the  country,  his  principal 
aim  and  object  was  to  take  good  care  of  him- 

79 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

self  and  to  leave  behind  him  a  great  name, 
but  without  any  expense  either  to  himself  or  to 
the  Company.  .  .  .  With  that  view  he  con- 
sidered the  erection  of  a  church  very  necessary. 
.  .  .  The  Director  wished  and  insisted  that  it 
should  be  located  in  the  Fort,  where  it  was 
erected  in  spite  of  the  others.  And,  truly,  the 
location  is  as  suitable  as  a  fifth  wheel  to  a 
coach;  for,  besides  being  small,  the  Fort  lies 
on  a  point,  which  would  be  of  more  importance 
in  case  of  population;  the  church,  which  ought 
to  be  owned  by  the  people  who  defrayed  the 
expense  of  its  construction,  intercepts  and  turns 
aside  the  Southeast  wind  from  the  gristmill  which 
stands  in  that  vicinity ;  and  this  is  also  one  of  the 
causes  [!]  why  a  scarcity  of  bread  prevails  fre- 
quently in  summer  for  want  of  grinding.  But 
this  is  not  the  sole  cause ;  for  the  mill  is  neglected, 
and  having  been  leaky  most  of  the  time,  it  has 
become  decayed  and  somewhat  rotten,  so  that 
it  cannot  now  work  with  more  than  two  arms, 
and  has  gone  on  thus  for  all  of  five  years. 
But  returning  to  the  church,  from  which  the 
gristmill  has  for  the  moment  diverted  us,  the 
Director  concluded,  then,  to  have  one  built  and 
on  the  spot  which  he  preferred.  He  lacked 
money  —  and  where  was  this  to  be  got?  It 

80 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

happened,  about  this  time,  that  Everardus 
Bogardus,  the  clergyman,  gave  in  marriage  a 
daughter,  by  his  first  wife.  The  Director 
thought  this  a  good  time  for  his  purpose,  and  set 
to  work  after  the  fourth  or  fifth  drink;  and  he 
himself  setting  a  liberal  example,  let  the  wedding 
guests  sign  whatever  they  were  disposed  to  give 
towards  the  church.  Each,  then,  with  a  light 
head,  subscribed  away  at  a  handsome  rate,  one 
competing  with  the  other;  and  although  some 
heartily  repented  it  when  their  senses  came  back, 
they  were  obliged,  nevertheless,  to  pay — noth- 
ing could  avail  against  it.  The  church,  then, 
was  located  in  the  Fort,  in  opposition  to  every 
one's  opinion.  The  honor  and  ownership  of 
that  work  must  be  inferred  from  the  inscription, 
which,  in  our  opinion,  is  somewhat  ambiguous, 
and  reads  thus:  'Anno  1642.  Willem  Kieft, 
Directeur  Generael,  heeft  de  gemeente  desen 
temple  doen  bouwen.'  But,  laying  that  aside, 
the  people  nevertheless  paid  for  the  church." 

That  is  the  tone  of  the  Remonstrance 
throughout.  In  a  petty  spirit  it  dealt 
with  petty  grievances  at  a  length  out  of 
all  proportion  to  their  importance,  and 

6  8l 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

left  what  evidently  were  substantial 
grievances — as  the  high  duties  and  the 
manifold  inspections — far  from  clearly 
explained.  That  the  complainants  dis- 
missed in  a  few  lines  the  greatest  of  all  the 
colonial  crimes  against  good  government 
and  against  humanity,  Kieft's  Indian  war, 
was  not  surprising.  The  wreck  of  colo- 
nial interests  which  had  been  brought 
about  by  that  war  was  well  understood  in 
Holland.  There  was  no  need  that  it 
should  be  explained. 


IX 


OLONI AL  discontent  usually  is  rea- 
sonable,  and  always  is  natural.  It 
is  reasonable,  because  colonies  are  pretty 
certain  to  be  neglected,  or  remembered 
only  to  be  harshly  dealt  with,  by  the 
home  government.  It  is  natural,  be- 
cause of  the  qualities  pretty  certainly 
inherent  in  colonists:  who  for  the  most 
part  are  either  untried  young  men  of 
strong  character  who  know  little  of  the 
world  but  are  eager  to  make  their  way 
in  it  quickly,  or  incapable  middle-aged 
men  who  have  failed  at  home  yet  des- 
perately hope  to  mend  their  broken 
fortunes  abroad.  Of  the  small  residuum, 
the  men  who  settle  down  to  work  and 

83 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

who  silently  and  steadfastly  build  their 
own  fortunes  by  subduing  a  savage  land, 
very  little  ever  is  heard.  It  is  the  "  kick- 
ers "  who  make  the  noise.  Here  in  Amer- 
ica our  sympathies  always  have  been 
on  the  colonial  side,  and  our  animosities 
against  home  governments  in  general  al- 
ways have  been  strong.  Perhaps,  now 
that  we  are  in  the  way  of  being  (some- 
what unwillingly)  a  "  world  power  "  our- 
selves, with  swaggering  and  blustering 
colonies  of  our  own,  our  point  of  view 
may  change.  It  even  is  conceivable  that 
in  time  we  may  come  to  have  quite  a 
compassionating  fellow-feeling  for  our 
once  tyrant,  the  late  King  George  the 
Third! 

Actually,  in  spite  of  bad  laws  badly 
administered,  the  colony  of  New  Nether- 
land  did  make  headway.     This  country 
was  a  rich  country,  and  its  exploitation 
84 


s:  Ss 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

— even  under  heavy  handicaps — yielded 
a  good  return.  In  the  year  1624  the 
cargo  of  furs  sent  home  by  Director  May, 
"as  a  first  year's  remittance  from  New 
Netherland,"  sold  for  28,000  guilders. 
Two  years  later  the  showing  was  still  bet- 
ter. Under  date  of  November  5,  1626, 
the  following  report  was  sent  from  Am- 
sterdam to  the  States  General : 

"Yesterday  arrived  here  the  ship  the  Arms  of 
Amsterdam,  which  sailed  from  New  Netherland, 
out  of  the  River  Mauritius,  on  the  23 d  of  Septem- 
ber. They  report  that  our  people  are  in  good 
heart  and  live  in  peace  there.  The  women  also 
have  borne  some  children  there.  They  have 
bought  the  Island  Manhattes  from  the  Indians 
for  the  value  of  60  guilders — 'tis  n.ooomorgens 
[about  22,000  acres]  in  size.  They  had  all  their 
grain  sowed  by  the  middle  of  May,  and  reaped 
by  the  middle  of  August.  They  send  thence 
samples  of  summer  grain — such  as  wheat,  rye, 
barley,  oats,  buckwheat,  canary -seed,  beans, 
and  flax.  The  cargo  of  the  aforesaid  ship  is: 
7246  beaver  skins,  178^  otter  skins,  675  otter 

85 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

skins,  48  minck  skins,  36  wild  cat  skins,  33 
mincks,  34  rat  skins.  Considerable  oak  timber 
and  hickory." 

Charles  Wooley,  writing  half  a  century 
later,  gives  these  values:  "beaver  skins, 
ordinary,  10  shillings;  beaver  skins,  black, 
1 5  shillings ;  minck  skins,  5  shillings ;  otter 
skins,  ordinary,  8  shillings;  otter  skins, 
black,  if  very  good,  20  shillings."  Rough- 
ly estimated,  and  without  allowance  for 
the  fall  in  the  value  of  peltries  in  that 
half  century,  the  value  of  the  cargo  of  the 
Arms  of  Amsterdam  therefore  was  not  less 
than  $25,000 — or  well  above  $50,000,  in 
the  values  of  to-day.  In  another  way  the 
manifest  of  that  ship  is  interesting.  It 
is  the  earliest  known  manifest  of  a  ship 
clearing  from  this  port.  The  cargo  seems 
to  have  been  an  exceptional  one.  In  the 
year  1628  the  exports  hence  "in  two 
ships"  is  given  at  61,000  guilders — only  a 
86 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

trifle  above  the  value  of  the  lading  of  that 
single  ship  four  years  earlier — and  for 
the  years  1629-30  the  exports  were  valued 
at  130,000  guilders.  In  the  year  1632  the 
exports  of  furs  alone  were  valued  at 
140,000  guilders,  and  in  the  year  1635  at 
135,000  guilders.  I  must  add,  however, 
that  the  figures  of  that  early  time  have  a 
wandering  way  with  them  that  places 
them  anywhere  but  above  reproach.  Yet 
they  show,  at  least,  that  returns  of  a 
respectable  sort  began  almost  imme- 
diately to  come  in  from  the  colony,  and 
that  those  returns  increased  from  year 
to  year. 

With  the  development  of  trade  be- 
tween the  colony  and  the  home  country 
went  also  the  development  of  a  trade 
that  was  wholly  colonial.  By  the  year 
1635  a  considerable  commerce  was  car- 
ried on  between  New  Netherland  and 

87 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

New  England — of  which  the  less  impor- 
tant part  was  direct,  and  the  more  im- 
portant part  was  the  carriage  of  tobacco 
and  salt  from  Virginian  and  West  Indian 
ports  to  Boston.  The  suggestive  fact  also 
is  recorded  that  in  the  year  1 63  7  a  Dutch 
ship  sailing  direct  from  the  Texel  landed 
in  Boston  a  cargo  of  sheep  and  oxen  and 
Flanders  mares.  Naturally,  the  English 
did  not  take  kindly  to  such  commercial 
under-cutting;  and  all  the  more  nat- 
urally because  the  Dutch  stiffly  refused 
to  permit  English  traders  to  come  upon 
their  own  colonial  preserves. 

Touching  those  preserves,  there  was  a 
sharp  little  clashing  of  rights  in  April 
1633,  when  the  William,  a  London  ship 
commanded  by  a  renegade  Dutchman, 
came  into  this  port  "  to  trade  at  Hudson's 
river" — and  peremptorily  was  refused  a 
trading  license.  There  was  a  fine  inter- 
88 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

change  of  bravadoes  between  Director 
Van  Twiller  and  the  William's  captain. 
Flags  were  run  up  and  salutes  were  fired, 
and  there  was  a  vast  amount  of  vaporing 
talk  on  the  Director's  side.  But  at  the 
end  of  it  all  the  ship  did  go  up  the  river 
—being  the  first  English  vessel  to  ascend 
the  Hudson — and  her  captain  would  have 
made  his  trade  unmolested  had  not  De 
Vries  put  some  stiffening  into  Van 
Twiller 's  weak  backbone.  "If  it  had 
been  my  case,"  said  De  Vries,  shortly 
and  hotly,  "  I  should  have  helped  him 
from  the  Fort  to  some  eight-pound  iron 
beans!"  "The  English,"  he  added,  and 
his  remark  has  quite  a  modern  ring  in  it, 
"are  of  so  haughty  a  nature  that  they 
think  everything  belongs  to  them";  and 
he  concluded  by  declaring  with  energy: 
"I  should  send  the  ship  Souther g  after 
him  and  drive  him  out  of  the  river!"  And 
89 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

that  was  precisely  what  Van  Twiller,  be- 
ing thus  brought  up  to  the  collar,  then 
did. 

It  was  not  in  human  nature,  therefore, 
for  the  English  quietly  to  permit  Dutch 
ships  to  trade  in  English  colonial  ports 
when  English  ships  were  refused  trading 
privileges  in  Dutch  colonial  ports;  and, 
as  a  matter  of  fact,  the  profitable  trade 
that  was  developed  between  New  Nether- 
land  and  the  plantations  in  New  Eng- 
land and  Virginia — while  immediately 
beneficial  to  the  Dutch — was  one  of  the 
most  active  of  the  several  causes  which 
led  to  the  wresting  from  the  Dutch  of 
their  holding  in  North  America.  The 
matter  is  too  broad  in  its  scope  to  be 
dealt  with  fully  here;  yet  am  I  loath  to 
relinquish  it  because  of  the  many  very 
human  touches  in  which  it  abounds. 

With  one  scrap  of  ancient  history, 
90 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

wherein  the  humanity  still  is  fresh  and 
strong,  I  am  justified  in  dealing:  the  fa- 
mous case  of  the  ship  Eendracht — driven 
by  stress  of  weather  into  Plymouth  in  the 
year  1632,  and  there  seized  by  the  Eng- 
lish port  authorities  (I  quote  the  Dutch 
version  of  the  matter)  "  on  an  untrue  rep- 
resentation that  the  Peltries  were  bought 
within  the  jurisdiction  or  district  belong- 
ing to  his  majesty  of  Great  Britain." 
Over  that  seizure  there  was  a  diplomatic 
squabble  between  Holland  and  England 
that  went  on  for  years — and  the  whole  of 
it,  I  am  persuaded,  was  the  outcome  of  a 
love-affair!  According  to  a  letter  sent 
by  the  States  General  to  their  Am- 
bassador in  England,  the  Eendracht  was 
"seized  on  false  information  of  the 
Provost  of  said  ship  .  .  .  and  of  the 
Pilot  who,  in  opposition  to  the  Director 
and  Skipper,  being  on  shore  got  married." 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

There  is  the  crux  of  it,  I  am  sure.  But 
for  that  Pilot's  impetuously  inopportune 
determination  to  wed  the  widow  (I  am 
quite  certain  that  she  was  a  widow,  be- 
cause of  the  eagerness  of  it  all)  he  very 
probably  could  have  taken  the  Eend- 
racht  out  of  Plymouth  harbor  and  safe 
away  to  sea.  Being  ordered,  no  doubt, 
to  do  that  very  thing — and  the  widow 
ashore  waiting  for  him! — he  and  his 
friend  the  Provost  laid  the  "  untrue  rep- 
resentation "  which  led  on  to  those  years 
of  diplomatic  blustering:  but  which  also 
led  to  the  detention  of  the  ship  at  Plym- 
outh until  he  was  safe  wed  to  his  bounc- 
ing bride! 

After  all,  what  mattered  it  if  Holland 
and  England  were  embroiled  by  that 
brave  Pilot's  hot -hearted  indiscretion? 
Every  man  thinks  first  of  his  own  happi- 
ness; and  in  love-affairs — it  has  been  so 
92 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

from  the  world's  beginning — he  thinks  of 
nothing  else.  I  wish  that  we  had  the  end 
of  the  story.  Let  us  hope  that  his  widow 
repaid  him  for  his  gallant  defiance,  for 
her  sweet  sake,  of  the  orders  of  captains 
and  directors,  and  that  it  turned  out 
well — that  sailor-wedding  which  shook 
two  great  states  to  their  foundations 
nearly  three  centuries  ago !  In  all  serious- 
ness, I  am  justified  in  recalling  here  that 
only  half -told  and  long-forgotten  idyl.  It 
had  its  place,  the  love  -  making  of  that 
precipitate  Pilot,  among  the  causes  which 
in  time's  fulness  changed  New  Nether- 
land  and  New  Amsterdam  into  the  State 
and  City  of  New  York. 


X 


UNDER  spur  of  the  " remonstrances  " 
— there  were  many  of  them — sent 
home  by  the  colonists,  the  States  General 
did  make  some  effort  to  deal  with  New 
Netherland  on  lines  of  equity.  An  of- 
ficial inquiry  was  made  into  the  affairs 
of  the  West  India  Company  in  the  year 
1638  that  resulted  in  checking  some  of  the 
worst  of  the  colonial  abuses;  and  that 
also  led  to  the  promulgation  (1640)  of  a 
new  charter  of  Liberties  and  Exemptions 
which  materially  added  to  the  welfare  of 
the  colony,  and  increased  the  comfort  of 
the  colonists,  by  relaxing  the  regulations 
under  which  trade  was  conducted  and 
94 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

by  easing  the   conditions  under  which 
the  people  lived. 

Kieft,  be  it  said  to  his  credit,  gave  ef- 
fect to  this  liberal  policy  in  so  liberal  a 
spirit  that  the  three  ensuing  years — until 
almost  ruin  came  with  the  Indian  war 
— probably  were  the  most  prosperous  in 
the  time  of  Dutch  rule.  Notably,  he  en- 
couraged English  refugees,  fleeing  from 
religious  persecution  in  New  England,  to 
settle  in  New  Netherland;  and  those 
settlers — maintaining  relations  with  their 
friends  and  kinsfolk  —  did  much  to  de- 
velop the  intercolonial  trade  of  which  I 
have  written  above.  By  the  year  1642 
the  English  were  so  numerous  in  New 
Amsterdam  that  the  appointment  of  an 
official  interpreter  became  necessary ;  and 
that  officer  also  was  required  to  serve  as 
an  intermediary  between  the  Dutch  mer- 
chants and  the  English  ship-masters  who 
95 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

broke  the  voyage  between  New  England 
and  the  Virginia  plantations  by  stopping 
here  for  a  bit  of  trade. 

It  was  for  the  accommodation  of  such 
wayfarers  that  the  City  Tavern — which 
later  became  the  Stadt  Huys — was  built, 
facing  Coenties  Slip,  in  the  year  1642; 
and  it  seems  to  have  been  built  badly, 
as  it  manifested  such  a  decided  dispo- 
sition to  tumble  to  pieces  in  little  more 
than  half  a  century  that  it  was  torn 
down.  I  should  be  glad  to  believe  that 
hospitality  was  the  corner-stone  of  that 
nominally  hospitable  edifice ;  but  I  fancy 
that  in  building  it  some  thought  may 
have  been  taken  of  the  fact  that  trade 
in  a  tavern  is  apt  to  turn  in  favor  of 
the  trader  who  has  the  hardest  head — 
and  it  is  an  incontestable  fact  that  our 
Dutch  ancestors  had  heads  upon  which 
they  could  rely.  Possibly  some  of  those 
96 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

visiting  English  skippers  carried  away  in 
their  aching  heads  unkindly  memories  of 
our  City  Tavern — as  they  beat  down  the 
harbor  and  out  through  the  Narrows  on 
their  way  to  Virginia,  or  as  they  affront- 
ed the  dangers  of  Hell  Gate  on  their  way 
eastward  up  the  Sound! 

The  encouragement  that  Kieft  gave  to 
the  incoming  of  the  English,  and  to  the 
trade  with  the  neighboring  English  colo- 
nies, tended  to  the  immediate  good  of  New 
Netherland ;  but  in  the  end,  of  course,  the 
influx  of  those  settlers,  and  the  strain- 
ing of  relations  with  the  government  to 
which  they  owed  allegiance,  were  the 
chief  factors  in  hastening  the  downfall 
here  of  Dutch  rule.  George  Baxter,  the 
official  interpreter  —  he  seems  to  have 
been  a  fuming  sort  of  a  person — was  one 
of  the  leaders  of  the  rebellion  that  broke 
out  among  the  English  on  Long  Island 

7  97 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

in  the  year  1655;  a  rebellion  that  Stuy- 
vesant's  temporizing  policy  did  not  check, 
and  that  helped  to  give  a  valuable  part 
of  New  Netherland  to  the  English  nine 
years  before  they  grabbed  it  all. 

In  another  way  Kieft's  liberal  admin- 
istration of  more  liberal  laws  led  on  to 
catastrophe.  The  increased  freedom  in 
trading  tended  to  facilitate  the  supply  of 
arms — in  exchange  for  good  bargains  in 
peltries — to  the  savages;  and  so  enabled 
the  savages  to  make  their  winning  fight 
when,  by  Kieft's  own  abominable  act,  the 
time  for  fighting  came.  From  the  very 
beginning  the  trade  in  arms  with  the 
Indians  offered  temptations  too  strong 
to  be  resisted  by  the  money  -  seeking 
Dutch — just  as  it  has  offered  temptations 
too  strong  to  be  resisted  by  the  money- 
seekers  of  our  own  time  on  our  western 
frontier.  Under  Kieft  it  went  on  swim- 
98 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

mingly.  In  those  days  a  musket  sold  for 
twenty  beaver  skins,  and  a  pound  of  gun- 
powder was  worth  in  furs  from  ten  to 
twelve  guilders:  and  so  the  "bosch- 
lopers,"  or  "runners  in  the  woods,"  made 
their  account  with  the  savages — and  gave 
no  thought  to  the  reaping  of  the  whirl- 
wind that  was  to  come  in  sequence  to  that 
sowing  of  the  wind. 

Actually,  the  "  bosch-lopers  "  were  mere 
agents.  The  sources  of  supply  of  that 
pernicious  trade  were  the  capitalists  of 
the  colony.  In  the  year  1644  a  ship 
sent  out  from  Holland  by  the  Patroon 
of  Rensselaerswyck  —  being  searched  by 
mere  accident  at  New  Amsterdam — was 
found  to  have  on  board,  not  on  her 
manifest,  "  four  thousand  pounds  of  pow- 
der and  seven  hundred  pieces,  to  trade 
with  the  natives."  The  illicit  cargo  was 
confiscated  with  a  great  show  of  pro- 
99 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

priety:  but  I  do  not  doubt  that  the 
powder  and  the  pieces  got  along  to  the 
natives  in  due  course.  In  Stuyvesant's 
time  (July  9,  1648)  "  Govert  Barent,  the 
armourer  at  Fort  Amsterdam,"  and  three 
others  were  arrested,  and  two  of  the  four 
"were  convicted  and  sentenced  to  death 
for  violating  the  proclamation  against 
the  illicit  trade  in  fire-arms."  But  the 
convicted  and  sentenced  ones  were  not 
executed.  "  By  the  intervention  of 
many  good  men  "  they  got  off  from  the 
hanging  which  they  richly  deserved,  and 
nothing  worse  happened  to  them  than 
the  confiscation  of  their  illegally  held 
property.  In  other  words,  public  sen- 
timent was  in  favor  of  the  trade — in 
which,  practically,  everybody  desired  to 
have  a  hand — and  no  real  attempt  was 
made  to  suppress  it  because  the  rulers 
of  the  colony  shared  the  popular  feeling 
100 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

and  either  were  weak  or  were  venal,  and 
for  the  most  part  were  both.  The  re- 
sponsibility for  that  sin,  as  for  many 
others,  therefore  rests  primarily  with  the 
West  India  Company :  which  without  ex- 
ception, from  Van  Twiller's  time  onward, 
appointed  as  Directors  of  New  Nether- 
land  men  utterly  unfitted  to  perform  the 
gravely  important  duties  with  which  they 
were  charged. 

As  was  shown  by  the  official  inquiries 
made  from  time  to  time  into  the  affairs 
of  the  colony,  usually  followed  by  small 
reforms,  the  Dutch  government  was  not 
wholly  unmindful  of  the  evils  wrought  by 
the  mercenary  corporation  to  which  it 
had  delegated  too  great  powers;  but,  the 
initial  error  of  delegating  those  powers 
having  been  committed,  not  even  the 
States  General  could  set  right  what  had 
begun  by  being,  and  what  continued 
101 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

until  the  end  to  be,  hopelessly  wrong. 
From  the  start,  that  ill-conceived  colo- 
nial venture  had  in  it  the  seeds  of  fail- 
ure. The  wonder  is  not  that  it  ended  so 
soon,  but  that  it  lasted  so  long. 


XI 


WHEN  Peter  Stuyvesant,  the  last  of 
those  incompetent  Directors,  took 
over  the  government  of  New  Netherland 
(May  n,  1647)  things  were  in  a  hope- 
lessly bad  way.  Mr.  Brodhead,  whose 
disposition  is  to  make  the  best  of  Dutch 
shortcomings,  thus  summarizes  the  situa- 
tion: "  Excepting  the  Long  Island  settle- 
ments, scarcely  fifty  bouweries  could  be 
counted;  and  the  whole  province  could 
not  furnish,  at  the  utmost,  more  than 
three  hundred  men  capable  of  bearing 
arms.  The  savages  still  were  brooding 
over  the  loss  of  sixteen  hundred  of  their 
people.  Disorder  and  discontent  pre- 
vailed among  the  commonalty ;  the  public 
103 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

revenue  was  in  arrear,  and  smuggling  had 
almost  ruined  legitimate  trade;  conflict- 
ing claims  of  jurisdiction  were  to  be 
settled  with  the  colonial  patroons;  and 
jealous  neighbors  all  around  threatened 
the  actual  dismemberment  of  the  prov- 
ince. Protests  had  been  of  no  avail ;  and 
the  decimated  population,  which  had 
hardly  been  able  to  protect  itself  against 
the  irritated  savages,  could  offer  but  a  fee- 
ble resistance  to  the  progress  of  European 
encroachment.  Under  such  embarrassing 
circumstances  the  last  Director  General 
of  New  Netherland  began  his  eventful 
government. ' '  And  to  this  Mr.  Brodhead 
might  have  added  in  set  terms  what  he 
does  add  virtually  by  his  subsequent  pre- 
sentment of  facts :  that  Peter  Stuyvesant, 
so  far  from  being  the  man  to  set  a  wrong- 
going  colony  right,  was  precisely  the  man 
to  set  a  right-going  colony  wrong. 
104 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

Irving,  with  his  accustomed  genial 
warping  of  the  truth,  has  created  so 
kindly  a  caricature  of  the  last  of  the 
Dutch  governors  that  our  disposition  is 
to  link  him  with,  almost  to  exalt  him  to 
the  level  of,  the  blessed  Saint  Nicholas 
— our  city's  Patron.  Such  association 
is  not  justified  by  the  facts,  and  our 
good  Saint — notwithstanding  his  notable 
charity  and  humility — most  reasonably 
might  take  exception  to  it.  In  truth, 
Stuyvesant  had  little  in  common  with 
any  respectable  saint  in  the  calendar ;  and 
to  come  upon  the  real  man — as  he  is  re- 
vealed in  the  official  records  of  his  time 
— is  to  experience  the  shock  of  painful 
discovery. 

The  Remonstrance  of  the  year  1649, 

already    cited,    while    dealing    generally 

with  the  manifold  misfortunes  brought 

upon  the  colonists  by  bad  government, 

105 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

deals  particularly  with  the  misdoings  of 
the  last  Director:  who  then  had  been  in 
office  for  only  two  years  and  a  half,  and 
who  in  that  time  had  succeeded  in  set- 
ting the  whole  colony  by  the  ears.  "  His 
first  arrival,"  declared  the  remonstrants, 
"was  peacock-like,  with  great  state  and 
pomposity";  and  the  burden  of  their 
complaint,  constantly  recurred  to,  is  of 
his  brutally  dictatorial  methods  and  of 
his  coarsely  arrogant  pride.  "  His  man- 
ner in  court,"  they  declare,  "has  been 
...  to  browbeat,  dispute  with,  and  har- 
ass one  of  the  two  parties;  not  as  be- 
seemeth  a  judge,  but  like  a  zealous  ad- 
vocate. This  has  caused  great  discontent 
everywhere,  and  has  gone  so  far  and 
had  such  an  effect  on  some  that  many 
dare  not  bring  any  suits  before  the  court 
if  they  do  not  stand  well,  or  passably 
so,  with  the  Director;  for  whom  he  op- 
106 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

poseth  hath  both  sun  and  moon  against 
him.  .  .  .  He  likewise  frequently  sub- 
mits his  opinion  in  writing  .  .  .  and 
then  his  word  is:  'Gentlemen,  this  is 
my  opinion,  if  any  one  have  ought  to 
object  to  it,  let  him  express  it.'  If  any 
one  then,  on  the  instant,  offer  objection 
.  .  .  his  Honour  bursts  forth,  inconti- 
nently, into  a  rage  and  makes  such  a  to 
do  that  it  is  dreadful;  yea,  he  frequently 
abuses  the  Councillors  as  this  and  as  that, 
in  foul  language  better  befitting  the  fish- 
market  than  the  Council  board;  and  if 
all  this  be  tolerated,  he  will  not  be  satis- 
fied until  he  have  his  way."  In  regard  to 
the  right  of  appeal  to  the  home  govern- 
ment, his  declaration  is  cited  that  "  Peo- 
ple may  think  of  appealing  during  my 
time  —  should  any  one  do  so,  I  would 
have  him  made  a  foot  shorter,  pack  the 
pieces  off  to  Holland,  and  let  him  appeal 
107 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

in  that  way."  And  to  this  the  remon- 
strants added  by  way  of  comment:  "Oh 
cruel  words!  What  more  could  a  sover- 
eign do?" 

As  the  tone  of  the  complainings  shows, 
there  was  another  side  to  all  this.  Ac- 
cording to  his  lights  (which  were  few) 
and  within  his  limitations  (which  were 
many)  Stuyvesant  was  in  the  way  of  be- 
ing a  reformer:  and  reformers  ever  have 
been  painted  blackest  by  those  whom 
they  sought  to  reform.  That  outrageous 
little  colony  needed  a  deal  of  reforming 
when  he  took  over  its  government;  and 
had  his  mandatory  proclamations  stop- 
ped with  the  one  that  forbade  "sabbath 
breaking,  brawling,  and  drunkenness,"  he 
still  would  have  had  a  hornets'  nest  about 
his  ears.  Fancy  what  would  have  been 
the  consensus  of  opinion  on  the  part  of 
the  leading  citizens  of  Fort  Leavenworth 
108 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

had  any  reforming  person  fired  off  at 
them  a  proclamation  of  that  sort  in  the 
old  days  of  the  Santa  Fe  Trail!  But 
Stuyvesant's  reforms  cut  deeper.  Not 
content  with  trying  to  reduce  to  decency 
the  energetic  social  customs  of  the  colo- 
nists, he  tried  also  to  bring  them  up  to  the 
line  of  honest  dealing:  and  so  struck  at 
their  pockets  as  well  as  at  their  hearts. 
He  forbade  the  sale  of  liquor  to  the 
savages:  a  most  profitable  business  in 
itself,  and  of  much  indirect  advantage 
to  those  engaged  in  it  —  because  an  in- 
toxicated savage  obviously  was  more 
desirable  than  a  sober  -savage  to  bargain 
with  for  furs.  He  made  stringent  reg- 
ulations which  checked  the  profitable 
industry  of  smuggling  peltries  into  New 
England,  and  European  goods  thence 
into  New  Netherland.  He  issued  revo- 
lutionary commands  that  the  frowsy 
109 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

and  draggle-tailed  little  town  should  be 
set  in  order  and  cleansed.  And  on  top 
of  all  this,  farther  to  replenish  the  ex- 
hausted treasury  of  the  colony,  he  levied 
a  tax  upon  liquors  and  wines.  That  was 
the  climax  of  his  offending.  As  the  out- 
raged and  indignant  colonists  themselves 
declared — becomingly  falling  back  upon 
holy  writ  for  a  strong  enough  simile — 
the  wine  and  liquor  tax  was  "like  the 
crowning  of  Rehoboam!" 

It  is  not  surprising  that  such  a  com- 
munity should  be  at  odds  with  such  a 
ruler.  Nearly  half  a  century  later,  when 
New  Amsterdam  had  become  New  York, 
a  like  resentful  commotion  was  stirred 
up  by  another  and  a  far  better  reform 
governor,  Lord  Bellomont :  who  was  sent 
out  from  England  to  put  down,  and 
who  did  put  down,  the  pirates  and  smug- 
glers then  flourishing  in  this  town.  But 
no 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

Lord  Bellomont  was  a  strong  man  and  a 
just  man — who  carried  through  his  re- 
forms to  a  masterly  finish  precisely  be- 
cause his  sense  of  justice  restrained  him 
from  making  an  arbitrary  use  of  his 
strength.  Stuyvesant  was  neither  strong 
nor  just,  and  he  was  arbitrary  to  the  last 
degree.  Considering  the  material  that 
he  had  to  work  on,  and  considering  also 
the  manners  and  customs  of  his  times,  his 
headstrong  ways  and  his  coarse  speech 
admit  of  palliation.  No  doubt  he  gave 
those  equally  headstrong  and  equally 
foul-mouthed  colonists  pretty  much  what, 
in  one  way,  they  deserved.  But  provo- 
cation is  not  justification.  The  capital 
error  of  his  government  was  not  its 
harshness  but  its  arbitrary  harshness.  He 
seems  to  have  been  a  waspish  little 
man,  with  a  testy  temper  that  ever  dis- 
posed him  to  fly  into  a  rage  with  any- 
iii 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

body  who  in  the  smallest  particular  con- 
tradicted him;  and,  assuredly,  he  lacked 
the  sagacity  that  might  have  saved  him 
from  letting  fly  his  choleric  outbursts  with 
an  indiscriminating  violence  that  destroy- 
ed the  moral  effect  of  what  very  often,  no 
doubt,  was  his  righteous  wrath. 

Under  such  a  government  as  Stuy- 
vesant  gave  to  that  unfortunate  colony 
there  could  be  no  real  improvement  in  its 
affairs.  Even  when  his  attempted  re- 
forms were  sound — and  for  the  most  part 
they  were  sound — the  effect  of  them  was 
weakened,  and  their  realization  was  made 
difficult  or  impossible,  by  the  manner  in 
which  they  were  applied. 


NOVA       B     F.     L    G    I    C    A/f,v. 


THE    VISSCHER   MAP,    WITH    A    VIEW    OF    N' 


llSTERDAM    DRAWN     BEFORE    THE    YEAR    1653 


XII 

BUT  a  better  man  than  Stuyvesant 
— while  he  might  have  lost  it  with 
more  dignity — could  not  have  saved  to 
Holland  the  colony  of  New  Netherland. 
Forces  from  within  and  forces  from  with- 
out were  working  for  its  destruction.  In- 
ternally, its  affairs  were  administered  with 
incompetence  tempered  with  injustice — 
and  it  owed  its  bad  government  to  the 
fact  that  it  was  but  a  by- venture  in  a 
great  scheme  of  combined  money-making 
and  statecraft;  and  to  the  farther  fact 
that  it  was  more  and  more  neglected, 
or  remembered  only  to  be  more  tightly 
squeezed,  as  the  ruinous  end  of  the  West 
India  Company  drew  near.  Externally, 

8  113 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

the  English  constantly  were  pressing  more 
closely  upon  its  borders:  strong  in  their 
determination  to  have  the  whole  of  it; 
and  in  the  mean  time  taking  possession 
of  such  scraps  of  it — as  the  eastern  end 
of  Long  Island — as  dropped  loose  of  their 
own  accord.  Such  conditions  led  inev- 
itably to  the  loss  of  that  which  never 
had  been  well  held. 

The  evil  star  of  the  West  India  Com- 
pany was  the  most  conspicuous  among 
the  several  stars  in  their  courses  which 
fought  against  the  Dutch  in  their  struggle 
to  hold  fast  to  their  American  colonies. 
The  condition  of  the  Company  never  was 
sound  financially.  By  heroic  marauding 
it  did  acquire  a  vast  sum  of  money — 
which  went  as  quickly  as  it  came.  But 
the  Company  absolutely  failed  to  build 
up  in  any  part  of  its  dominions  a  sub- 
stantial legitimate  trade  from  which  it 
114 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

could  draw  securely  a  stable  revenue.  Its 
nearest  approach  to  founding  a  well- 
ordered  colony  was  in  the  Brazils,  under 
the  one  competent  governor  that  it  ever 
sent  out  from  Holland:  Count  John 
Maurice  of  Nassau.  Under  the  wise  rule 
of  that  excellent  ruler  a  liberal  scheme 
of  trade  regulations  was  established;  re- 
ligious toleration  was  assured ;  and  for  all 
classes  alike  there  was  just  enforcement 
of,  and  equal  protection  under,  a  just  code 
of  laws.  But,  to  quote  Dr.  Asher,  "  even 
Count  John  Maurice's  brilliant  talents 
yielded  no  pecuniary  profits.  Compelled 
by  the  strict  and  reiterated  orders  of  the 
Directors  of  the  Company,  he  had  to  carry 
on  an  incessant  war  with  the  Portuguese 
in  southern  Brazil.  Great  part  of  his  rev- 
enue consisted  of  booty;  and  his  troops 
ruined  more  than  they  took  away — draw- 
ing upon  the  Dutch  possessions  similar 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

acts  of  retribution  from  the  enraged 
enemy.  Among  those  horrors  of  border 
warfare  agriculture  and  trade  could  not 
survive."  If  such  a  state  of  affairs  ob- 
tained in  the  best  managed  of  the  Com- 
pany's colonies,  and  at  a  time  when  the 
Company  was  in  a  flourishing  condition, 
we  need  not  be  surprised  that  the  state 
of  affairs  in  its  worst  managed  colony — 
our  own  New  Netherland  —  became  al- 
most unendurable  as  the  Company  drew 
nearer  and  nearer  to  collapse. 

From  the  year  1630  onward  the  Com- 
pany's finances  showed,  as  Dr.  Asher  puts 
it,  "a  terribly  constant  downward  ten- 
dency." Only  a  year  after  it  had  paid  its 
famous  dividend  upon  its  treasure-ship 
winnings,  and  out  of  its  remaining  sur- 
plus had  lent  600,000  guilders  to  the 
Dutch  government,  it  was  unable  to  meet 
its  running  expenses.  Under  its  charter 
116 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

it  was  entitled  to  a  subsidy;  but  the 
government — partly  because  of  lack  of 
funds,  but  more  because  of  the  adverse 
action  taken  by  the  dominant  political 
ring — was  slack  in  making  the  promised 
payments  and  the  subsidy  fell  badly  into 
arrear.  Money  from  other  sources  was 
not  forthcoming.  No  colonial  trade  of 
importance  had  been  developed;  and  the 
plan  for  breaking  Spain's  line  of  com- 
munication with  her  colonial  treasure- 
houses  had  been  executed  so  effectively 
that  it  had  reacted  upon  its  projectors 
after  the  manner  of  a  boomerang;  that 
is  to  say,  although  the  Company  had  to 
carry  the  load  of  an  armed  fleet  created 
mainly  to  bag  Spanish  plate-ships,  the 
seas  were  empty  of  plate-ships  to  be 
bagged. 

Bad  luck  had  something  to  do  with 
the  Company's  misfortunes,  but  at  the 
117 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

root  of  them  was  bad  management.  The 
same  stupidity,  or  worse,  that  was  shown 
in  the  conduct  of  the  affairs  of  our  own 
little  New  Netherland  was  shown  on  a 
larger  scale  in  the  conduct  of  the  far 
more  important  affairs  in  Brazil.  At  the 
end  of  a  long  series  of  quarrels  with  the 
Council,  Count  John  Maurice  resigned  his 
commission  in  disgust  in  the  year  1644. 
His  successors,  for  the  most  part,  were 
incompetents.  When  they  happened  to 
possess  wits  they  used  them  in  betraying 
the  Company's  interests — for  a  consider- 
ation— to  the  Portuguese.  It  took  just 
ten  years  of  that  sort  of  thing  to  bring 
matters  to  their  logical  climax.  In  the 
year  1654  the  Company's  troops  evacu- 
ated the  Brazils. 

Ten  years  more  brought  the  end  of 
everything.     Dr.  Asher  puts  the  record 
of  those  ten  calamitous  years  into  a  few 
118 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

words.  "We  cannot  here  attempt,"  he 
writes,  "to  describe  the  Company's  last 
agony :  its  vain  attempts  to  combine  with 
the  East  India  Company;  its  painful  ef- 
forts to  obtain  from  the  government 
either  armed  assistance  or  payment  of  its 
arrears.  The  symptoms  of  bankruptcy 
became  saddening  and  more  threatening 
from  year  to  year.  At  last  its  creditors 
began  to  seize  the  Company's  property. 
The  death  blow  was  struck  in  1664 — 
when  New  Netherland,  the  Company's 
last  valuable  possession,  was  conquered 
by  the  English."  And  so  that  rather 
grandly  conceived,  but  consistently  ill 
executed  enterprise,  came  to  a  miserable 
end.  As  a  warning,  the  history  of  its  few 
triumphs  and  of  its  many  failures  has 
a  permanent  value.  And  especially  does 
its  history  point  the  moral  that  it  is 
unwise,  to  say  the  least,  to  try  to  get 
119 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

from  invested  patriotism  a  dividend  in 
cash. 

Conceivably,  by  the  exercise  of  a  small 
amount  of  common  sense,  the  Dutch 
might  have  retained  their  holdings  in 
Brazil;  but  from  their  holdings  in  North 
America  —  New  Netherland,  and  the 
colony  on  the  Delaware — the  common 
sense  of  all  the  ages  could  not  have 
saved  them  from  being  squeezed  out. 
There  they  were  at  grips  with  a  race 
stronger  than  their  own  in  numbers,  and 
not  less  strong  in  sheer  grit.  For  thirty 
years  before  the  end  came,  the  English 
were  pressing  in  upon  their  territory  from 
the  east  and  from  the  south ;  while  across 
seas,  with  a  large  statesmanship,  the 
English  government  was  taking  a  hand 
in  putting  on  the  screws. 

The  most  effective  twist  of  the  English 
screw  was  the  passage  by  the  Common- 
120 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

wealth  Parliament  (October  9,  1651)  of 
the  Navigation  Act:  which  decreed  that 
goods  imported  into  England  must  come 
in  English  ships  or  in  ships  belonging  to 
the  country  in  which  the  goods  were 
produced.  As  the  Dutch  at  that  time 
had  the  carrying  trade  of  the  world  pretty 
well  in  their  hands,  the  English  law  was 
in  the  nature  of  some  of  our  own  highly 
impersonal  legislation  affecting  "  cities  of 
the  first  class. ' '  No  names  were  mention- 
ed— but  it  hit  where  it  was  meant  to  hit, 
and  it  hit  hard.  A  loud  buzzing  of  am- 
bassadors followed  that  shot  at  Dutch 
commerce.  But  the  propositions  made 
by  Holland — that  there  should  be  free 
trade  to  the  West  Indies  and  to  Virginia, 
and  that  "  a  just,  certain,  and  immovable 
boundary  line"  should  be  fixed  between 
the  English  and  the  Dutch  territories  in 
America — came  to  nothing ;  and  so,  pres- 
121 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

ently,  there  was  the  louder  buzzing  of 
guns.  In  the  handsome  little  war  that 
followed  (1652-54),  the  English  —  while 
practically  gaining  what  they  fought  for 
— experienced  the  unusual  sensation  of 
being  soundly  whipped  at  sea.  Blake 
fairly  was  driven  to  take  shelter  in  the 
Thames :  after  which  Tromp  went  sailing 
up  and  down  the  Channel  with  that  ag- 
gravating broom  at  his  mast-head,  to 
which  reference  is  inexpedient  in  talking 
with  the  average  Englishman  even  now. 

Here  in  Manhattan  there  was  a  great 
show  of  bellicosity  while  that  waspish 
little  war  went  on.  It  was  then — under 
orders  from  Holland  to  put  the  town  in  a 
state  of  defence — that  our  famous  wall 
was  built  along  the  line  of  what  now  is 
Wall  Street.  Thomas  Baxter  (who  proved 
himself  to  be  a  very  bad  lot,  a  little  later) 
had  the  contract  for  supplying  the  pali- 
122 


t-  w 

c     M 

a     B 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

sadoes  which  were  intended  to  stand  off 
his  own  countrymen ;  but  which,  in  point 
of  fact,  never  stood  off  anything  more 
dangerously  aggressive  than  wandering 
cows.  Also,  the  city  watch  was  strength- 
ened ;  and  preparations  for  a  naval  demon- 
stration (in  the  event  of  a  hostile  fleet 
appearing  before  the  city)  were  made  by 
ordering  Schipper  Visscher  "to  keep  his 
sails  always  ready,  and  to  have  his  gun 
loaded  day  and  night."  In  a  word,  we 
all  were  full  of  fight  in  ihat  strenuous 
time — but,  mercifully,  carnage  was  avert- 
ed. It  takes  two  armies  to  make  a 
battle:  and  the  English  army,  for  which 
we  were  waiting  in  so  blood-thirsty  a 
mood,  discreetly  remained  at  a  safe  dis- 
tance from  our  pugnacious  little  fume  of 
a  town. 


XIII 

STUYVESANT  showed  both  manli- 
ness and  good  common  sense  in  deal- 
ing with  the  most  threatening  feature  of 
that  really  volcanic  situation :  the  charge 
made  by  the  New-Englanders  that  he 
had  endeavored  to  stir  up  against  them 
an  Indian  revolt.  He  met  the  charge 
promptly  by  inviting  the  Commissioners* 
to  send  delegates  to  New  Amsterdam  to 
investigate  it — and  when  they  came  he 
refuted  it.  More  than  that,  he  submitted 

*  The  colonies  of  New  Plymouth,  Massachusetts, 
Connecticut  and  New  Haven  became  confeder- 
ated, May  19,  1643,  as  "The  United  Colonies  of 
New  England."  The  administration  of  the  affairs 
of  the  confederacy  was  intrusted  to  a  board  con- 
sisting of  two  commissioners  from  each  colony. 

124 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

to  the  delegates  very  reasonable  and  just 
propositions  for  the  regulation  of  inter- 
colonial affairs.  In  substance,  those  prop- 
ositions were:  I.  Neighborly  friendship, 
without  regard  to  the  hostilities  in 
Europe;  II.  Continuance  of  trade  as  be- 
fore; III.  Mutual  justice  against  fraudu- 
lent debtors;  IV.  A  defensive  and  offen- 
sive alliance  against  common  enemies. 
But  the  delegates  refused  to  entertain  his 
propositions,  and  went  back  to  Boston  in 
an  unexplained  but  quite  unmistakable 
huff.  Very  likely  they  had  an  instinctive 
feeling  that  treaties  were  unnecessary — 
since,  without  treaties,  things  were  com- 
ing their  way. 

Moreover,  the  desire  of  the  New-Eng- 
landers  to  fight  the  Dutch  was  strong. 
Patriotism  may  have  been  at  the  root  of 
that  desire,  but  its  more  obvious  motive 
was  a  mere  commonplace  human  longing 
125 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEWYORK 

to  lay  hands  on  valuable  Dutch  property. 
Rhode  Island — in  those  years,  and  for 
many  succeeding  years,  the  abode  of 
notoriously  hard  characters — even  made 
a  start  at  a  little  war  of  spoliation  on  its 
own  account.  Two  loose  fish  of  thievish 
proclivities,  Dyer  and  Underbill,  were 
granted  a  license  by  that  disreputable 
colony  (June  3,  1653)  to  "take  all  Dutch 
ships  and  vessels  as  shall  come  into  their 
power";  and  the  energetic  Thomas  Bax- 
ter— fresh  from  his  palisading  operation 
in  Wall  Street,  and  very  likely  using  the 
profits  of  that  operation  in  fitting  out  his 
expedition — also  got  a  predatory  license 
from  Rhode  Island  ("turned  pirate,"  is 
the  way  that  Mr.  Brodhead  puts  it)  and 
made  a  spirited  looting  cruise  along  the 
Sound:  that  was  ended  by  his  being  " run 
in"  not  by  the  Dutch  but  by  the  au- 
thorities of  New  Haven. 
126 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

Only  the  action  of  Massachusetts  at 
that  juncture  averted  what  would  have 
been  a  most  horrid  little  war  between  the 
Dutch  and  the  English  colonies;  and,  as 
it  was,  the  war  was  escaped  by  a  very 
close  shave.  The  delegates,  being  come 
again  to  Boston,  presented  their  report 
of  the  evidence  that  had  been  laid  before 
them,  in  New  Amsterdam  and  elsewhere, 
for  and  against  the  alleged  Dutch  plot  to 
excite  an  Indian  rising;  and  the  matter 
was  referred  to  a  conference  of  "divers 
neighbouring  elders,"  held  before  the 
General  Court  of  Massachusetts,  with  in- 
structions to  find  out  "what  the  Lord 
calleth  to  do."  The  elders  found  proofs 
enough  to  "  induce  them  to  believe  "  in  the 
reality  of  "  that  late  execrable  plot,  tend- 
ing to  the  destruction  of  so  many  dear 
saints  of  God,  which  is  imputed  to  the 
Dutch  governor  and  fiscal";  but  they 
127 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

did  not  find  the  proofs  "  so  fully  conclu- 
sive as  to  clear  up  present  proceedings 
to  war."  Thereupon  the  General  Court 
voted  that  they  were  not  "  called  to  make 
a  present  war  with  the  Dutch." 

That  mild  decision  was  not  well  re- 
ceived. Voicing  the  popular  feeling  — 
and  with  the  bellicose  tendencies  of  his 
cloth  —  the  "teacher  of  the  church  at 
Salem"  wrote  to  urge  immediate  hos- 
tilities: the  postponement  of  which,  he 
declared,  already  "had  caused  many  a 
pensive  heart."  Six  out  of  the  eight 
Commissioners  were  at  one  with  this 
kindly  gentleman  in  his  desire  for  vica- 
rious blood-letting.  Solidly  they  cast 
their  votes  for  instant  war.  Fortunately, 
the  members  of  the  General  Court  of 
Massachusetts  kept  their  heads.  Rest- 
ing their  opinion  upon  the  terms  of  the 
colonial  Articles  of  Confederation,  they 
128 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

declared  that  it  was  beyond  the  powers 
of  "  six  commissioners  of  the  other  colo- 
nies to  put  forth  any  act  of  power  in  a 
vindictive  war,  whereby  they  shall  com- 
mand the  colonies  dissenting  to  assist 
them  in  the  same."  That  declaration — 
which  virtually  was  a  declaration,  near- 
ly two  centuries  in  advance  of  its  recog- 
nized existence,  of  the  doctrine  of  State 
Rights — saved  the  day.  The  Commission- 
ers sent  to  Stuyvesant "  a  peevish  reply  " : 
telling  him  that  his  "confident  denials 
of  the  barbarous  plot  charged  will  weigh 
little  in  the  balance  against  such  evi- 
dence" as  that  which  they  had  secured; 
and  adding  the  broad  and  vague  threat 
that  "we  must  still  require  and  seek  due 
satisfaction  and  security."  But  their 
vaporing  led  to  nothing,  and  the  war 
did  not  come  off.  Massachusetts  spoke 
the  final  word — in  reply  to  a  request 
9  129 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

from  Connecticut  that  "by  war,  if  no 
other  means  will  serve,  the  Dutch  at  and 
about  the  Manhatoes,  who  have  been  and 
still  are  like  to  prove  injurious  and  dan- 
gerous neighbours,  may  be  removed." 
To  that  intemperate  request  the  tem- 
perate answer  was  given  that  Massachu- 
setts refused  to  act  "  in  so  weighty  a  con- 
cernment as  to  send  forth  men  to  shed 
blood"  unless  satisfied  "that  God  calls 
for  it;  and  then  it  must  be  clear  and  not 
doubtful,  necessary  and  expedient." 

That  persistent  stand  for  peace  was 
due  in  part,  no  doubt,  to  the  fact  that 
between  Massachusetts  and  New  Nether- 
land  there  was  no  such  sharp  conflict 
of  interests  as  there  was  between  New 
Netherland  and  the  nearer-lying  English 
colonies ;  that,  on  the  contrary,  there  was 
even  a  certain  friendliness  between  the 
two  because  of  the  trade  that  went  on,  to 
130 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

their  common  advantage,  between  Bos- 
ton and  New  Amsterdam.  But  I  think 
that  what  really  prevented  the  war  was 
Stuyvesant's  promptness  and  frankness 
in  dealing  with  the  charge  that  he  had 
sought  to  stir  up  an  Indian  revolt.  The 
clearness  of  his  defence,  and  his  straight- 
forward way  of  making  it,  constituted  an 
appeal  to  the  sense  of  right  which  then 
and  always  was  characteristic  of  the 
Massachusetts  colonists ;  and  that  appeal, 
I  am  persuaded,  counted  for  more  with 
them  than  did  the  feeling  of  friendliness 
begotten  of  common  interests  in  trade. 

The  fact  is  to  be  noted  that  Stuyvesant 
uniformly  showed  in  what  may  be  termed 
his  foreign  policy  a  far  greater  wisdom 
than  he  usually  showed  in  his  domestic 
policy.  His  one  important  aggressive  act 
— his  reduction  (1655)  of  the  Swedish 
colony  on  the  Delaware,  in  dealing  with 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

which  Irving  has  quite  outdone  himself 
in  a  farrago  of  mingled  nonsense  and 
falsehood — was  admirably  planned  and 
most  successfully  executed.  He  gained 
his  end,  without  any  fighting  whatever, 
by  the  menacing  display  of  an  effective 
superior  force:  a  method,  it  will  be  ob- 
served, that  accords  precisely  with  the 
rules  laid  down  by  the  highest  modern 
authorities  on  the  art  of  war.  It  is  true 
that  in  the  Treaty  of  Hartford  (1650)  he 
yielded  too  much  to  the  English ;  but  his 
concessions  materially  lessened  the  dan- 
gerous border  troubles,  and  the  treaty 
certainly  was  beneficial  for  a  time.  His 
dealings  with  Virginia  were  to  still  better 
purpose.  Even  while  the  war  between 
Holland  and  England  was  in  progress — 
in  accordance  with  his  desire,  scouted  by 
the  New  -  Englanders,  for  "neighbourly 
friendship,  without  regard  to  the  hostil- 
132 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

ities  in  Europe" — he  made  two  attempts 
to  conclude  a  commercial  treaty  with  the 
Virginia  authorities ;  and  he  succeeded  in 
effecting  with  them  a  favorable  working 
arrangement  in  the  year  1653  that  led  on 
to  the  more  formal  and  equally  favorable 
convention  of  the  year  1660. 

The  Virginia  trade  began  to  be  of  im- 
portance in  the  year  1652,  when  the  ex- 
port tax  on  tobacco  shipped  from  New 
Netherland  was  removed;  a  concession 
on  the  part  of  the  Amsterdam  Chamber 
with  which  were  united  a  reduction  of  the 
price  of  passage  from  Holland  outward, 
and  permission — here  was  the  beginning 
of  our  slave  trade — for  the  colonists  to 
import  negroes  from  Africa.  A  hint  of 
trade  direct  with  the  Spanish  colonies  is 
found,  also,  in  a  list  of  charges  brought 
(1653)  by  the  West  India  Company 
against  the  proprietors  of  Rensselaer- 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

wyck;  one  of  those  charges  being  that 
"  licenses  have  been  granted  to  private  in- 
dividuals to  sail  to  the  coast  of  Florida." 
I  should  like  to  follow  up  that  interest- 
ing lead,  but  there  is  little  to  go  upon  in 
the  indiscreetly  reticent  records  of  the 
time.  One  other  important  trace  of  it 
I  have  found:  in  a  letter  (February  13, 
1659)  from  the  Amsterdam  Chamber  to 
the  Director  General  and  Council  in  New 
Netherland  granting  "  a  larger  liberty  to 
the  inhabitants  there  to  trade  ...  to 
France,  Spain,  Italy,  the  Caribbee  islands, 
and  other  parts,  to  dispose  of  and  sell 
their  freighted  products,  salted  fish,  wares 
and  merchandise  " ;  subject  to  the  restric- 
tion that  they  "shall  be  obliged  and 
bound  to  return  direct  either  here  before 
this  city  of  Amsterdam  or  back  to  New 
Netherland  to  the  place  of  your  Honours' 
abode,  in  order  to  pay  to  your  Honours, 
134 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

on  the  discharge  and  sale  thereof,  such 
duties  as  the  Company  here  derives  from 
them."  Bearing  on  this  matter,  but  a 
little  beside  it,  is  a  minute  (July  10,  1655) 
of  the  States  General  touching  a  memo- 
rial presented  by  the  Spanish  ambassador 
requesting  that  one  "  Sebastien  Raef,  a 
Captain  or  privateer  committing  piracies 
in  the  West  Indies  on  the  subjects  of  the 
Most  Illustrious  King  "  should  be  arrest- 
ed in  Amsterdam;  and  "  that  the  govern- 
ment of  New  Netherland  be  instructed 
to  arrest  in  their  harbours  Joan  van 
Kampen,  his  lieutenant,  together  with  his 
ship  and  effects,  that  law  and  justice  be 
administered  to  the  one  and  the  other, 
for  the  behoof  of  the  interested,  with  in- 
fliction of  exemplary  punishment  for  the 
piracies  they  have  committed."  From 
which  we  may  infer  that  somewhat  liberal 
notions  obtained  in  New  Netherland  as 

135 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

to  the  scope  of  commercial  relations  with 
the  colonies  of  Spain. 

Putting  incidental  piracies  out  of  the 
question,  Stuyvesant  certainly  endeavor- 
ed— according  to  his  lights — to  foster  the 
foreign  trade  of  New  Netherland.  His 
voyage  to  the  West  Indies  in  the  year 
1655  was  made  expressly  to  that  end;  and 
his  consistent  effort  seems  to  have  been 
to  make  New  Amsterdam  a  little  metrop- 
olis in  which  should  centre  the  American 
colonial  trade.  Possibly  I  am  going  too 
far  in  crediting  him  with  the  deliberate 
formulation  and  pursuit  of  a  policy  in 
which  was  such  large  statesmanship;  but 
it  is,  at  least,  an  interesting  and  a  sugges- 
tive fact  that  most  of  his  plans  touching 
the  exterior  affairs  of  the  colony  do  wear 
the  look  of  having  been  conceived  in  the 
spirit  of  one  who  had  that  great  end  in 
view. 

136 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

Unfortunately,  Stuyvesant  did  not 
show  in  dealing  with  home  matters  the 
excellent  qualities  which  he  showed  in 
dealing  with  intercolonial  matters.  Had 
he  done  so  his  record  would  have  been  a 
very  different  one,  and  his  governorship 
— while  ending  in  the  always  inevitable 
loss  of  his  province — would  have  ended 
without  disgrace.  The  shame  of  the  tak- 
ing of  New  Netherland  by  the  English 
was  not  that  it  was  conquered ;  it  was  that 
its  people — in  their  eagerness  to  escape 
from  a  government  that  had  become  in- 
tolerable—  almost  welcomed  their  con- 
querors. But  only  the  more  because  of 
his  bad  domestic  policy  does  the  last 
Director  need  the  praise,  that  assuredly 
is  due  to  him,  for  his  good  foreign  policy ; 
and  most  of  all  does  he  deserve  praise  for 
his  share — a  good  half  of  the  credit  be- 
longs to  Massachusetts — in  so  handling 
137 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

the  matters  at  issue  with  the  New  Eng- 
land colonies  as  to  avert  a  war  in  which 
the  meanest  sordid  motives  would  have 
found  vent  in  a  truly  horrible  way.  I 
suppose  that  there  can  be  nothing  more 
despairingly  cruel  than  a  fight  to  the 
death,  having  greed  for  its  motive,  be- 
tween two  castaways  on  a  desert  island 
in  a  lonely  sea:  and  it  would  have  been 
much  that  sort  of  a  fight  between  the 
handful  of  English  and  the  handful  of 
Dutch,  then  living  remote  and  isolated  in 
the  American  wilderness,  had  they  come 
to  blows. 


XIV 

IN  the  thick  of  that  troublous  time, 
while  Holland  and  England  were  at 
open  war  and  while  the  threat  of  war 
hung  over  their  dependent  colonies,  the 
long-cherished  desire  of  New  Amsterdam 
to  become  a  city  was  realized.  As  a 
matter  of  course,  it  was  not  realized  in  a 
satisfactory  way — nothing  was  satisfac- 
tory to  anybody,  to  state  the  case  broad- 
ly, in  which  the  West  India  Company 
had  a  hand;  but,  at  least,  on  February  2, 
1653,  the  civic  government  was  estab- 
lished which,  in  one  form  or  another, 
has  been  maintained  on  this  island  until 
this  present  day. 

By  the  terms  of  the  grant,  from  the 

139 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

Amsterdam  Chamber,  the  municipal  or- 
ganization of  New  Amsterdam  was  to 
resemble  "as  much  as  possible"  that  of 
the  parent  city  in  Holland;  but,  as  the 
matter  worked  out  in  practice,  the  possi- 
bilities proved  to  be  so  limited  that  the 
resemblance  was  in  the  nature  of  a  car- 
icature. Stuyvesant  set  up  and  main- 
tained his  right  to  appoint  the  members 
of  the  city  government  -  -  the  burgo- 
masters, schepens,  secretary,  and  schout 
— with  the  natural  result  that  his  au- 
thority continued  to  be  paramount  in 
civic  matters;  and  in  general  he  con- 
trived to  make  the  new  order  of  things 
very  much  the  same  as  the  old  order  so 
far  as  any  real  increase  of  liberties  was 
concerned.  In  a  word,  as  Mr.  Brodhead 
puts  it:  "The  ungraceful  concessions  of 
the  grudging  Chamber  were  hampered  by 
the  most  illiberal  interpretation  which 
140 


their  provincial  representative  could  de- 
vise." For  Mr.  Brodhead  —  whose  dis- 
position toward  the  Director  uniformly 
is  kindly  —  those  are  very  strong  words. 
But  they  are  amply  justified  by  the  facts. 
With  a  modernity  of  method  that  our 
citizens  of  that  period  resented  more 
keenly  (being  unaccustomed  to  it)  than 
we  resent  it  now,  Stuyvesant  made  out 
his  "  slate  " ;  and  then — with  a  directness 
that  a  Tammany  leader  would  weep  over 
in  envy — put  in  his  men  by  the  simple 
process  of  issuing  a  proclamation  in  which 
they  were  assigned  to  their  several  offices. 
Save  in  our  spasmodic  lucid  intervals  of 
civic  reform,  we  still  get  by  ways  only 
a  trifle  more  roundabout  to  just  the 
same  practical  results — and  philologists, 
with  these  early  facts  available  for  their 
study,  will  perceive  with  pleasure  the  nice 
linguistic  propriety  that  there  is  in  our 
141 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

present  use  of  the  Dutch  word  "boss." 
On  the  very  instant  that  this  city  be- 
came a  city  the  political  meaning  of 
that  word,  in  effect,  was  established  and 
defined. 

Some  of  the  men  named  on  Stuy- 
vesant's  "slate,"  as  is  the  custom  nowa- 
days, were  respectable  citizens.  More  of 
them,  still  in  accordance  with  modern 
custom,  were  not.  And  —  fitting  to  a 
hair  with  Tammany  methods — the  most 
important  office  was  given  to  the  worst 
of  them  all.  For  Schout — an  official  who, 
in  addition  to  presiding  over  the  Board  of 
Burgomasters  and  Schepens,  performed 
duties  which  in  a  way  combined  those 
of  our  modern  sheriff  and  district  attor- 
ney— Stuyvesant  appointed  Cornelis  van 
Tienhoven,  the  Company's  Fiscal:  and 
had  he  searched  through  the  whole  col- 
ony he  probably  could  not  have  found  a 
142 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

man   more   outrageously  unfit   for   any 
office  at  all. 

In  the  summary,  prepared  by  order  of 
the  States  General,  of  the  Remonstrance 
of  1649,  Van  Tienhoven  is  thus  pleasingly 
described:  "He  is  subtle,  crafty,  intel- 
ligent, sharp  witted  for  evil;  one  of  the 
oldest  inhabitants  in  the  country ;  is  con- 
versant with  all  the  circumstances  both 
of  Christians  and  Indians,  hath  even 
associated  with  the  savages  through 
lechery;  he  is  a  dissembler,  double-faced, 
a  cheat;  the  whole  country  proclaims 
him  a  knave,  a  murderer,  a  traitor,  in- 
asmuch as  he  by  false  reports  originated 
the  war  [the  Indian  war  of  1643].  He 
holds  the  office  of  Secretary,  wherein  he 
perpetrates  all  conceivable  sorts  of  blun- 
ders, now  against  one,  now  against  an- 
other, even  against  his  own  employers; 
he  fleeces  the  people." 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

To  this  arraignment  may  be  added  the 
testimony  of  Hendrick  van  Dyck,  given 
a  year  earlier  (1652)  when  he  was  super- 
seded in  his  office  of  Fiscal  by — to  use 
his  own  kindly  words — "  the  perjured, 
godless  Cornells  Tienhoven."  Van  Dyck 
uplifted  his  testimony  in  these  terms: 
"Were  an  honorable  gentleman  put  in 
my  place,  the  false  accusations  which 
the  Director  [Stuyvesant]  made  and  sent 
over  against  me  long  ago  might  have 
some  semblance  of  truth ;  but  his  perjured 
secretary,  Cornelis  van  Tienhoven,  who 
returned  hither  contrary  to  the  pro- 
hibition of  their  High  Mightinesses;  who 
is  known,  and  can  be  proved  to  all  the 
world,  to  be  a  *  *  *  and  perjurer;  who  is 
a  disgrace  to,  and  the  sole  affliction  of, 
Christians  and  heathens  in  this  country, 
and  whom  the  Director  always  hath  man- 
aged to  shield — this  is  the  person  whom 
144 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

the  Director  hath  of  his  own  authority 
appointed  Fiscal!"  It  is  only  just  to 
add  that  Van  Dyck's  genial  deliverance 
was  made  against  a  man  who  had  ousted 
him  from  a  lucrative  office  and  also,  as 
is  apparent,  while  he  himself  was  under 
fire.  Obviously,  he  had  his  little  prej- 
udices, and  he  certainly  did  not  hesitate 
to  express  them  with  an  engaging  frank- 
ness. But  the  fact  remains  that  every- 
thing in  his  statement  is  borne  out  by  the 
records — excepting,  perhaps,  the  asser- 
tion that  Van  Tienhoven  was  "the  sole 
affliction  of  Christians  and  heathens." 
That  is  too  exclusive.  The  Christians 
and  heathens  resident  in  New  Amster- 
dam were  variously  and  very  generally 
afflicted  in  those  unhappy  days. 

Touching  the  affair  of  Van  Tienhoven 
and  poor  Lysbet  van  Hoogvelt,  "the 
daughter  of  the  basket-maker  in  Amster- 

145 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

dam,"  the  dry  and  formal  records  of  two 
centuries  and  a  half  ago  suddenly  cease  to 
be  dry  and  formal  and  become  warmly 
alive.  It  is  inexpedient  to  quote  in  full 
the  several  long  depositions  taken  in  Hol- 
land in  the  matter,  and  it  also  is  need- 
less: a  few  extracts  from  those  ancient 
documents  will  suffice  to  make  the  case 
clear.  Louisa  Noe,  "  who  speaks  by  her 
woman's  troth,  instead  of  oath,"  testified 
that  there  came  to  her  "  to  engage  lodg- 
ings for  himself  and  a  young  lady  ...  a 
certain  corpulent  and  thickset  person,  of 
red  and  bloated  visage  and  light  hair, 
who  she  afterward  understood  was  called 
VanTienhoven."  Margaretta  van  Eeda, 
"tavern-keeper  in  old  Haerlem  at  the 
Sluice,"  bearing  witness  "upon  her  ve- 
racity and  conscience,  instead  of  upon 
oath,"  testified — in  more  kindly  terms 
as  to  my  gentleman's  personal  appear- 
146 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

ance — that  "  over  a  year  ago  there  came 
to  lodge  at  her  house  a  likely  person  of 
ruddy  face,  corpulent  body,  and  having 
a  little  wen  on  the  side  of  his  cheek,  who 
she  afterward  understood  was  from  New 
Netherland,  having  with  him  a  woman 
toward  whom  he  evinced  great  friendship 
and  love,  calling  her  always  '  Dearest, ' 
and  conversing  with  her  as  man  and  wife 
are  wont  to  do."  Elizabeth  Janns,  inn- 
keeper, of  The  Arms  of  Haerlem,  testified 
that  "a  person  named  Mr.  Cornelis  van 
Tienhoven  came  divers  times  to  the 
house  of  the  deponent,  keeping  open 
tavern  .  .  .  with  Lysbet  Janssen  Croon 
van  Hoogvelt  .  .  .  and  have  there  at 
different  times,  now  and  then,  eaten  fish 
and  showed  and  manifested  toward  each 
other  great  love  and  friendship,  such  as 
is  the  custom  among  sweethearts."  And 
the  end  of  the  story  is  told  in  a  letter 
147 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

written  here  in  Manhattan  by  Augustin 
Heermans,  September  20,  1651:  "The 
basket  -  maker's  daughter,  whom  Van 
Tienhoven  brought  from  Holland  on  a 
promise  of  marriage,  coming  here  and 
finding  he  was  already  married,  hath 
exposed  his  conduct  even  in  the  public 
court."  That  exposure,  as  is  evident, 
did  him  no  harm.  Less  than  a  year 
later  Stuyvesant  appointed  him  Fiscal, 
and  less  than  two  years  later  appointed 
him  Schout — and  so  made  him  the  chief 
officer  of  the  then  new-born  city  that 
now  is  New  York. 

I  have  dwelt  at  length  upon  Van 
Tienhoven 's  personal  record,  and  I  have 
revived  this  ancient  scandal  in  which 
poor  Lysbet  had  so  cruel  a  part  (and,  too, 
after  they  had  "eaten  fish  and  showed 
and  manifested  toward  each  other  great 
love  and  friendship"!)  because  such  de- 
148 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

tailed  statement  is  necessary  to  support 
convincingly  my  general  assertions  touch- 
ing the  immorals  of  the  inhabitants  and 
of  the  rulers  of  this  unfortunate  town. 
There  was,  indeed,  a  popular  outcry 
against  Van  Tienhoven's  appointment; 
but  it  seems  to  have  been  based  mainly 
on  the  ground  that  he  was  unfit  to  be 
Schout  because  he  still  continued  to  be  an 
officer,  the  Fiscal,  of  the  Company — not 
on  the  broader  and  very  tenable  ground 
that  he  was  an  unfit  person  to  hold  any 
public  office  at  all.  And,  also,  the  out- 
cry came  in  part — as  in  the  case  of  the 
shady  Van  Dyck,  who  had  been  "  turned 
down"  in  Van  Tienhoven's  favor — from 
citizens  whose  right  to  object  to  anybody 
on  the  score  of  immorals  was  of  a  highly 
attenuated  sort.  In  the  end,  to  be  sure, 
he  was  turned  out  of  his  office  in  disgrace 
by  order  of  the  West  India  Company ;  and 
149 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

Stuyvesant  was  forbidden  again  to  em- 
ploy him  —  or  to  employ  his  brother, 
Adriaen,  who  had  been  detected  in  fraud 
as  receiver  general — in  the  public  service. 
But  that  order  was  a  lashing  of  Stuy- 
vesant over  Van  Tienhoven's  shoulders, 
and  it  was  not  issued  until  Van  Tien- 
hoven  had  been  Schout  of  the  city  for 
three  years.  Even  Tammany  has  not 
beaten  this  record  in  civic  immorality 
which  our  city  scored  at  its  very  start. 


XV 

ON  December  10,  1653,  "  the  most  im- 
portant popular  convention  that  had 
ever  been  assembled  in  New  Netherland," 
to  quote  Mr.  Brodhead's  words,  met  in 
the  Stadt  Huys  of  New  Amsterdam.  That 
convention  —  being  a  gathering  of  rep- 
resentatives of  the  capital  city,  of  the 
near-by  Dutch  towns,  and  of  the  English 
towns  on  Long  Island — was  in  the  way 
of  being  an  impotent  parliament:  that 
came  together  not  as  a  governing  and 
law  -  making  body  but  to  remonstrate 
against  the  existing  government,  and 
against  the  tangle  of  inequitable  laws  (still 
farther  complicated  by  arbitrary  edicts) 
in  which  the  colonists  were  involved. 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

What  gave  that  queer  little  parliament 
its  chief  significance  was  the  presence,  for 
the  first  time  in  Dutch  councils,  of  English 
delegates;  and  the  fact  that  those  dele- 
gates came  to  the  council  rightfully,  as 
representatives  of  their  fellow  -  country- 
men legally  subject  to  the  government  of 
New  Netherland,  did  not  make  them 
any  the  less  representatives  of  the  race 
that  was  crowding  out  the  Dutch  from 
their  holding  in  the  new  world. 

It  was  at  the  instance  of  the  English, 
indeed,  that  the  council  was  convened. 
Long  Island  had  been  filling  up  steadily 
with  English  settlers,  and  those  settlers 
took  even  less  kindly  than  did  the  Dutch 
to  the  eccentricities  and  the  inefficiencies 
of  the  government  under  which  they 
lived.  Especially  did  they  resent  the 
failure  of  that  government  to  protect 
them  against  the  many  little  freebooters 
152 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

—  of  the  Thomas  Baxter  stripe  —  who 
committed  highly  annoying  robberies 
along  the  borders  of  the  Sound;  and 
against  the  many  stray  savages  who,  as 
occasion  offered,  engaged  in  little  ravag- 
ings  and  murderings  of  a  distasteful  sort. 
Also,  they  had  the  characteristic  English 
longing  to  be  let  alone  in  the  manage- 
ment of  their  local  affairs.  Out  of  which 
conditions  arose  among  them  the  not 
unreasonable  desire  either  to  be  taken 
care  of,  or  to  be  given  a  free  hand  in 
taking  care  of  themselves. 

In  order  to  talk  matters  over  with  the 
Dutch  authorities,  representatives  came 
up  from  Gravesend  and  Flushing  and 
Newtown;  and  a  conference  was  held  in 
the  Stadt  Huys  (November  26,  1653)  to 
consider  what  could  be  done  "for  the 
welfare  of  the  country  and  its  inhabi- 
tants," and  "to  determine  on  some  wise 

153 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

and  salutary  measures"  which  should 
bring  up  the  Sound  pirates  with  a  round 
turn.  The  Dutch  representatives  who 
met  them — members  of  the  city  govern- 
ment and  of  the  Provincial  Council — see- 
ing their  way  to  grinding  some  axes  of 
their  own,  recommended  that  a  general 
statement  of  grievances  should  be  em- 
bodied, as  usual,  in  a  "  remonstance  " ;  and 
that  with  the  remonstrance,  also  as  usual, 
should  be  coupled  a  prayer  for  relief. 
That  method  of  procedure  being  agreed 
to,  an  adjournment  of  a  fortnight  was 
decided  upon :  to  the  end  that  the  views 
of  the  colonists  of  Long  Island  and  of 
Staten  Island  might  be  obtained  more 
fully,  and  that  a  larger  number  of  dele- 
gates might  be  got  together;  in  effect, 
that  the  informal  meeting  might  be  raised 
to  the  dignity  of  a  little  Landtag.  Stuy- 
vesant  had  no  relish  for  such  doings.  The 
154 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

action  of  the  English,  he  declared,  "  smelt 
of  rebellion "  and  of  "  contempt  of  his 
high  authority  and  commission."  But 
the  popular  will  was  too  strong  for  him 
—or  he  was  too  weak  to  control  it,  which 
amounted  to  the  same  thing  —  and  he 
"very  reluctantly  sanctioned  the  meet- 
ing that  he  could  not  prevent."  Accord- 
ingly, on  December  zoth,  with  an  aug- 
mented membership,  the  council  was  re- 
convened. Four  Dutch  towns  and  four 
English  towns  were  represented,  and  the 
delegates — apparently  chosen  on  a  basis 
of  numerical  representation  —  were  ten 
of  Dutch  and  nine  of  English  nativity. 
And  all  of  them,  without  regard  to 
nationality,  harmoniously  were  agreed  to 
pool  their  grievances  and  to  go  for 
Director  Stuyvesant  horns  down! 

Considering  how  serious  those  griev- 
ances   were,    the    Remonstrance   which 
155 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

they  formulated  was  couched  in  ex- 
traordinarily temperate  terms.  That 
document  was  drawn  by  one  of  the 
representatives  from  Gravesend,  Ensign 
George  Baxter — who  is  not  to  be  con- 
founded with  the  piratical  Thomas — and 
as  the  work  of  an  Englishman  it  is  all  the 
more  remarkable  for  its  tone  of  loyal- 
ty to  the  government  of  Holland.  The 
preamble  runs  in  these  words:  ''Com- 
posed of  various  nations  from  different 
parts  of  the  world,  leaving  at  our  own 
expense  our  country  and  countrymen,  we 
voluntarily  came  under  the  protection  of 
our  sovereign  High  and  Mighty  Lords  the 
States  General,  whom  we  acknowledge  as 
our  lieges;  and  being  made  members  of 
one  body,  subjected  ourselves,  as  in  duty 
bound,  to  the  general  laws  of  the  United 
Provinces,  and  all  other  new  orders  and 
ordinances  which  by  virtue  of  the  afore- 
156 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

said  authority  may  be  published,  agree- 
ably to  the  customs  freedoms  grants  and 
privileges  of  the  Netherlands." 

What  the  remonstrants  did  object  to, 
and  pointedly,  was  the  publication  of 
new  orders  and  ordinances  which  dis- 
tinctly were  disagreeable  to  the  customs, 
and  still  more  disagreeable  to  the  free- 
doms, of  the  home  country.  The  first 
and  the  main  charge  of  their  remon- 
strance was  that  such  orders  and  or- 
dinances had  been  enacted  by  the  Direc- 
tor and  Council  "without  the  knowledge 
or  consent  of  the  people,"  and  that  the 
same  were  "contrary  to  the  granted 
privileges  of  the  Netherland  govern- 
ment, and  odious  to  every  free  born  man, 
and  especially  so  to  those  whom  God 
has  placed  under  a  free  state  in  newly 
settled  lands,  who  are  entitled  to  claim 
laws  not  transcending,  but  resembling  as 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

nearly  as  possible,  those  of  the  Nether- 
lands." 

Joined  with  this  remonstrance  in  chief 
— which,  in  effect,  was  no  more  than  an 
assertion  of  the  fact  that  the  colonists 
were  denied  common  right  and  common 
justice — minor  remonstrance  was  made 
against  the  failure  of  the  provincial  gov- 
ernment to  protect  persons  and  prop- 
erty; against  the  obligation  to  obey  "old 
orders  and  proclamations  of  the  Director 
and  Council,  made  without  the  knowledge 
or  consent  of  the  people,"  which  "  subject 
them  to  loss  and  punishment  through 
ignorance";  against  the  "wrongful  and 
suspicious  delay "  in  confirming  land 
patents;  against  land  grants  to  favored 
individuals  "to  the  great  injury  of  the 
Province  " ;  and  against  the  appointment 
of  officers  and  magistrates  "without  the 
consent  or  nomination  of  the  people 
158 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

.  .  .  contrary  to  the  laws  of  the  Nether- 
lands." In  conclusion,  the  authors  of 
that  surprisingly  modest  appeal  added: 
"As  we  have,  for  easier  reference,  re- 
duced all  our  grievances  to  six  heads,  we 
renew  our  allegiance,  in  the  hope  that 
satisfaction  will  be  granted  to  the  coun- 
try according  to  established  justice,  and 
all  dissensions  be  settled  and  allayed." 

There  is  a  very  marked  difference  be- 
tween the  verbose  and  mean  complain- 
ings of  the  more  famous  Remonstrance 
of  the  year  1649  ano^  the  simple  direct- 
ness and  dignity  of  this  demand  for 
obvious  rights;  and  had  there  been  any 
"established  justice"  for  New  Nether- 
land —  either  in  the  provincial  govern- 
ment or  in  the  home  government  —  it 
could  not  have  been  met,  as  it  was  met, 
by  a  flat  refusal  all  around.  Stuyvesant 
made  answer  to  it  by  a  general  denial, 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

that  included  a  particular  denial  of  the 
right  of  the  delegates  to  assemble;  and 
when  the  delegates  replied,  in  turn,  by 
an  appeal  to  that  natural  law  "which 
permits  all  men  to  assemble  for  the  pro- 
tection of  their  liberties  and  their  prop- 
erty," he  tersely  ordered  them  to  disperse 
"on  pain  of  our  highest  displeasure"; 
to  which  lordly  mandate,  by  way  of  a 
cracker,  he  added:  "We  derive  our  au- 
thority from  God  and  the  Company,  not 
from  a  few  ignorant  subjects;  and  we 
alone  can  call  the  inhabitants  together." 
In  Holland,  when  the  Remonstrance  got 
there,  the  answer  was  the  same.  The 
Directors  of  the  Company  wrote  to  Stuy- 
vesant  (May  18,  1654)  in  these  terms: 
"  We  are  unable  to  discover  in  the  whole 
Remonstrance  one  single  point  to  justify 
complaint.  .  .  .  You  ought  to  have  acted 
with  more  vigor  against  the  ringleaders 
1 60 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

of  the  gang.  ...  It  is  our  express  com- 
mand that  you  punish  what  has  occurred 
as  it  deserves,  so  that  others  may  be 
deterred  in  future  from  following  such 
examples."  And  at  the  same  time  the 
Directors  wrote  to  the  Burgomasters  and 
Schepens  of  New  Amsterdam  command- 
ing "  that  you  conduct  yourselves  quietly 
and  peaceably,  submit  yourselves  to  the 
government  placed  over  you,  and  in  no 
wise  allow  yourselves  to  hold  particular 
convention  with  the  English  or  others 
in  matters  of  form  and  deliberation  on 
affairs  of  state,  which  do  not  appertain  to 
you;  and,  what  is  yet  worse,  attempt  an 
alteration  in  the  state  and  its  govern- 
ment." 

The  answer  from  Holland  sustained  one 

half  of  Stuyvesant's  declaration  that  he 

derived  his  authority  "  from  God  and  the 

Company  " — so  far  as  the  Company  went, 

«  161 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

his  delegated  authority  was  confirmed 
and  sustained.  But  the  other  half  of 
his  declaration  did  not  come  out  so  well. 
A  decade  later  his  draft  on  divine  power 
was  returned  dishonored ;  and  only  a  turn 
of  chance  in  his  favor  prevented  that 
draft  from  going  to  protest  within  a  year. 
The  twist  of  luck  that  saved  him  tem- 
porarily was  the  conclusion  of  peace 
(April,  1654)  between  England  and  Hol- 
land; and  the  consequent  abandonment 
by  Cromwell  of  his  project  for  paci- 
fying the  colonial  situation — in  a  breez- 
ily statesman -like  fashion — by  annexing 
New  Netherland  out  of  hand.  Actually, 
the  Protector's  annexation  scheme  came 
to  the  very  edge  of  being  realized.  An 
effective  naval  force  was  despatched  from 
England;  the  New  England  colonies — 
Massachusetts  alone  lagging  a  little — 
buzzed  with  eager  preparations  for  the 
162 


THE   DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

fight  that  they  so  longed  for;  and  the 
English  colonists  on  Long  Island,  de- 
lightedly bustling  to  the  front,  made  a 
fair  start  toward  the  impending  revolu- 
tion by  declaring  their  independence  of 
Dutch  authority  and  by  setting  up  a 
microscopic  government  of  their  own. 
And  then,  just  as  everybody  (with  the 
exception  of  Director  Stuyvesant)  was 
ready  for  things  to  happen,  the  peace  was 
concluded — and  nothing  happened  at  all ! 
But  it  was  only  by  a  very  narrow  margin 
that  the  orders  for  the  seizure  of  New 
Netherland  were  countermanded  before 
New  Netherland  was  seized. 

While  the  war  was  imminent  New 
Amsterdam  was  in  a  whirl.  Stuyvesant 's 
mental  attitude  in  the  premises  seems  to 
have  bordered  upon  consternation.  In 
regard  to  practical  provision  for  defence 
he  wrote:  "We  have  no  gunners,  no 
163 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

musketeers,  no  sailors,  and  scarcely  six- 
teen hundred  pounds  of  powder" — a 
statement  that  exhibits  in  rather  a  start- 
ling fashion  the  physical  unpreparedness 
of  the  colony  for  a  long-threatened  war. 
On  its  moral  side  the  situation  was  worse. 
The  Director  declared  that  he  did  not 
expect  "  the  people  residing  in  the  coun- 
try, not  even  the  Dutch,"  to  back  him 
in  the  fight  that  was  coming  on;  and 
added:  "The  English,  although  they 
have  sworn  allegiance,  would  take  up 
arms  and  join  the  enemy  ...  to  invite 
them  to  aid  us  would  be  bringing  the 
Trojan  horse  within  our  walls." 

By  the  Director's  own  showing,  there- 
fore, it  appears  that  the  spirit  of  loyalty 
in  the  colony  —  if  such  a  spirit  can  be 
said  ever  to  have  existed — practically  was 
dead,  and  that  the  spirit  of  revolt  was 
very  much  alive.  His  English  subjects 
164 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

— almost  openly  in  New  Amsterdam, 
quite  openly  on  Long  Island — were  im- 
patient for  the  coming  of  their  country- 
men. His  Dutch  subjects  were  in  a 
state  of  sulky  mutiny  that  made  them 
more  than  half  ready  to  welcome  the 
coming  of  anybody  who  would  give  them 
a  new  government  of  any  sort — because 
of  their  moody  conviction  that  any 
change  whatever  must  give  them  a  better 
government  than  that  under  which  they 
lived.  And  it  all  was  quite  logical.  It 
was  the  natural  and  inevitable  outcome 
of  thirty  years  of  consistent  misrule. 


XVI 

FOR  my  present  purposes  it  is  need- 
less to  treat  at  all  in  detail  the  last 
ten  years  of  the  Dutch  domination  of 
New  Netherland.  Little  concessions  con- 
tinued to  be  made  to  the  colonists;  large 
wrongs  continued  to  oppress  them ;  there 
were  more  "remonstrances";  there  was 
an  Indian  war.  Fresh  turns  produced 
fresh  figures  in  that  small  kaleidoscope, 
but  the  constituent  elements  of  the  fig- 
ures remained  unchanged.  The  essential 
change  came  from  the  outside;  and  even 
that  was  but  the  continued,  yet  always 
increasing,  pressure  of  those  forces  which 
had  begun  to  operate  (as  I  have  already 
written)  before  the  unstable  foundation 
1 66 


1  3 

r  o 


*•     V 

2  * 

3  o 


J 

?,:  it* . 


M 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

of  the  Dutch  colony  was  laid.  With  the 
steadfast  persistence  of  fate  inevitable 
the  English  grip  tightened  as  the  English 
cordon  closed  in. 

By  the  year  1659  the  eastern  end 
of  Long  Island — surrendered  by  Stuyve- 
sant  under  the  terms  of  the  Treaty  of 
Hartford  (1650) — was  a  vigorous  Eng- 
lish colony ;  and  was  manifesting  its  vigor 
in  a  characteristic  English  fashion  by 
crowding  down  into  the  Dutch  territory 
westward  of  the  Oyster  Bay  line.  That 
thrust  at  close  quarters  was  not  easy  to 
deal  with.  Releases  of  land  were  ob- 
tained in  due  form  by  Englishmen  from 
accommodating  sachems  in  temporary 
financial  difficulties — or  in  chronic  thirst 
that  such  transactions  in  real  estate 
would  provide  means  for  temporarily 
slaking — and  on  the  land  thus  obtained 
modest  settlements  were  made.  Present- 
167 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

ly,  becoming  immodest,  the  settlers  of 
those  settlements  asserted  that  they  were 
under  the  jurisdiction  of  Connecticut;  an 
assertion  that  produced  awkward  con- 
flicts of  authority,  no  matter  how  hotly 
it  was  denied. 

Up  in  the  north,  in  the  back-country, 
Massachusetts  was  reaching  out  to  tap 
the  Dutch  fur- trade  at  its  source:  calmly 
ignoring  the  provisions  of  the  Treaty  of 
Hartford  and  claiming  as  her  own  all  the 
territory  between  lines  running  westward 
from  three  miles  south  of  the  Charles 
and  three  miles  north  of  the  Merrimac 
straightaway  across  the  continent  to  the 
Pacific.  The  southern  line  of  that  hand- 
some claim  of  everything  in  sight  down 
to  sunset  crossed  the  Hudson  not  far 
from  Saugerties;  and  the  kindly  inten- 
tion of  the  claimants  was  to  relieve  the 
Dutch  of  all  care  of  the  upper  reaches  of 
168 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

the  river,  and  incidentally  to  divert  from 
New  Amsterdam  to  Boston  the  bulk  of 
the  trade  in  furs.  In  presenting  the 
matter  to  Stuyvesant  for  consideration 
(September  17,  1659)  the  Commissioners 
shyly  urged  "  we  conceive  the  agreement 
at  Hartford,  that  the  English  should  not 
come  within  ten  miles  of  Hudson's  river, 
doth  not  prejudice  the  rights  of  the 
Massachusetts  in  the  upland  country,  nor 
give  any  rights  to  the  Dutch  there"; 
upon  the  strength  of  which  ingenious 
conception  they  asked  that  free  passage 
from  the  sea  into  and  through  the  river 
should  be  given  to  the  English  settlers — 
"they  demeaning  themselves  peaceably, 
and  paying  such  moderate  duties  as  may 
be  expected  in  such  cases" — resident 
upon  its  upper  banks.  And  by  way  of 
justifying  their  modest  request  the  Com- 
missioners drew  an  airy  parallel  in  free 
169 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

international  water-ways  between  the 
Hudson  on  the  one  hand  and  on  the 
other  the  Elbe  and  the  Rhine.  It  is 
to  Stuyvesant's  credit  that  his  reply 
(October  29,  1659)  to  those  cheeky  Com- 
missioners was  a  flat  refusal ;  and  that  he 
immediately  sent  off  to  the  Amsterdam 
Chamber — in  order  to  be  in  a  position 
to  back  his  refusal  practically  —  a  de- 
mand for  "a  frigate  of  sixteen  guns." 
That  the  frigate  did  not  come  was  a  mere 
administrative  detail  quite  in  the  natural 
order  of  things. 

By  way  of  completing  the  English  cor- 
don, Lord  Baltimore's  people  were  press- 
ing the  Dutch  from  the  south.  The 
Dutch  trading -post  on  the  Delaware 
river — or  the  South  river,  as  they  called 
it — was  a  losing  venture  from  first  to  last ; 
and  onward  from  the  time  (1638)  of  the 
planting  of  the  Swedish  colony  on  the 
170 


THE  DUTCH   FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

west  shore  of  the  Delaware,  on  what 
nominally  was  Dutch  territory,  the  gov- 
ernment of  New  Netherland  was  in- 
volved in  snarling  difficulties  in  its  ef- 
forts to  maintain  its  rights.  Before  the 
Swedes  were  reduced  to  approximate 
order  —  even  after  their  official  conquest 
they  continued  to  give  trouble — the  much 
more  serious  trouble  with  the  English 
colonists  of  Maryland  began. 

Those  complications  were  brought  to  a 
head  by  the  formal  demand  (August  3, 
1659)  addressed  by  Governor  Fendall, 
Lord  Baltimore's  representative,  to  "the 
pretended  Governor  of  a  people  seated 
in  Delaware  Bay,  within  his  Lordship's 
Province,"  to  "depart  forth  of  his  Lord- 
ship's Province" — or  to  take  the  conse- 
quences! And  Governor  Fendall  indi- 
cated what  the  consequences  were  likely 
to  be  by  adding  politely:  "or  otherwise 
171 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

I  desire  you  to  hold  me  excused  if  I  use 
my  utmost  endeavour  to  reduce  that  part 
of  his  Lordship's  Province  unto  its  due 
obedience  under  him."  The  little  am- 
bassador who  carried  the  Maryland  gov- 
ernor's courteous  but  peremptory  letter 
to  the  Dutch  commandant  on  the  Dela- 
ware delivered  it  in  a  "pretty  harsh  and 
bitter"  manner;  and  emphasized  its  pur- 
port by  remarking  incidentally  that,  "  as 
the  tobacco  is  chiefly  harvested,"  the 
people  of  Maryland  were  quite  at  leisure 
for  a  fight.  "It  now  suits  us,"  he  con- 
cluded— in  what  no  doubt  was  meant  to 
be  a  persuasive  spirit — "  best  in  the  whole 
year." 

But  the  sporting  offer  of  the  Mary- 
landers  to  fill  in  the  close  season  for 
tobacco  with  a  time-killing  war  did  not 
materialize.  Their  ardor  was  a  little 
cooled,  perhaps,  by  the  prompt  despatch 
172 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

of  reinforcements  to  the  Delaware  colony 
from  New  Amsterdam;  and  the  assertion 
of  possession  was  refuted  so  logically— 
on  the  ground  that  Lord  Baltimore's 
patent  gave  him  rights  only  to  unseated 
lands,  and  therefore  excluded  him  from 
a  region  colonized  by  the  Dutch  at  least 
fifteen  years  before  his  patent  was  grant- 
ed— that  for  the  moment  their  claim  was 
shelved.  It  was  by  no  means  quieted, 
however.  Until  the  Dutch  were  squeezed 
out  and  done  for,  the  pressure  of  the 
English  upon  New  Netherland  from  the 
south  was  continued  with  the  same  per- 
sistence that  characterized  the  pressure 
of  the  English  upon  that  unlucky  colony 
from  the  east  and  from  the  north.  There 
was  no  escape  from  those  advancing  ten- 
tacles: behind  which,  resistless,  was  the 
power  of  England.  It  was  a  cuttle-fish 
situation  that  could  end  in  only  one  way. 

173 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

The  end  would  have  come  a  trifle 
sooner,  no  doubt,  had  the  Protector 
lived  a  little  longer  or  had  the  Restora- 
ation  followed  directly  upon  his  death. 
During  the  interval  between  September, 
1658,  and  May,  1660,  the  domestic  tribu- 
lations of  the  English  gave  them  no  time 
to  bother  about  colonial  extension :  they 
had  their  hands  full  of  matters  requir- 
ing immediate  attention  at  home.  But 
when  Charles  II.  resumed  business  as  a 
king  the  would-be  ousters  of  the  Dutch 
in  America  instantly  came  to  the  front 
again. 

Lord  Baltimore  was  at  the  very  head 
of  the  procession.  "Charles  had  hardly 
reached  Whitehall,"  as  Mr.  Brodhead 
puts  it,  "before  Lord  Baltimore  instruct- 
ed Captain  James  Neale,  his  agent  in 
Holland,  to  require  of  the  West  India 
Company  to  yield  up  to  him  the  lands 
174 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

on  the  south  [west]  side  of  Delaware  Bay." 
The  Earl  of  Stirling,  while  less  prompt 
than  Lord  Baltimore,  made  up  for  his 
seemly  delay  by  an  unseemly  insistence. 
In  a  petition  to  the  King  he  set  forth 
that  the  "  Councell  for  the  affaires  of 
New  England  ...  in  the  eleaventh  year 
of  the  raigne  of  your  Mat8  royall  Father 
of  blessed  memory  did  graunt  unto 
William  Earle  of  Sterlyne,  your  peti- 
tioner's Grandfather,  and  his  heires,  part 
of  New  England  and  an  Island  adja- 
cent called  Long  Island.  .  .  .  That  yor 
Peticoners  Grandfather  and  father,  and 
himself e  their  heire,  have  respectively 
enjoyed  the  same  and  have  at  their  greate 
costs  planted  many  places  on  that  Isl- 
and; but  of  late  divers  Dutch  have  in- 
truded on  severall  parts  thereof,  not  ac- 
knowledging themselves  within  your  Mat8 
allegiance,  to  your  Mat8  disherison  and 
175 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

your  Peticoner's  prejudice."  Wherefore 
he  prayed:  "May  your  Majestie  be 
pleased  to  confirme  unto  your  Peticdner 
his  said  inheritance  to  be  held  imme- 
diately of  the  Crowne  of  England,  and 
that  in  any  future  treaty  betweene  your 
royall  selfe  and  the  Dutch  such  provision 
may  be  as  that  the  Dutch  there  may 
submitt  themselves  to  your  Mats  gov- 
ernem*  or  depart  those  parts."  Consid- 
ering that  the  Stirling  grant  covered 
Dutch  territory,  his  lordship's  neatest 
turn  is  his  reference  to  the  intruding 
"divers  Dutch";  but  there  is  an  air  of 
easy  assurance  about  his  whole  petition 
that  does  credit  to  even  a  Scotch  earl. 

To  Lord  Baltimore's  jaunty  require- 
ment, cited  above,  that  the  West  India 
Company  should  "yield  up  to  him"  the 
lands  on  the  west  side  of  Delaware  Bay, 
the  Directors  gave  "  a  proud  answer  " :  to 
176 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

the  effect  that  they  "would  use  all  the 
means  which  God  and  nature  had  given 
them  to  protect  the  inhabitants  and  pre- 
serve their  possessions. ' '  But  they  mani- 
fested less  pride,  and  more  alarm,  in  a 
memorial  that  they  promptly  addressed 
to  the  States  General :  praying  that  a  pro- 
test should  be  presented  by  the  Dutch 
ambassador  in  London  against  English 
aggression ;  and  that  a  demand  should  be 
made  for  the  restoration  to  New  Nether- 
land  of  the  territory  that  the  English 
had  "  usurped."  Under  instructions  from 
their  High  Mightinesses,  the  ambassador 
protested  and  demanded  accordingly: 
and  with  precisely  the  same  practical  re- 
sult that  would  have  followed  had  he 
protested  against  the  flowing  of  the 
tides,  and  had  he  demanded  the  cause  of 
tidal  eccentricities — the  moon! 

The  Connecticut  people,  being  keen  to 

177 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

assert  what  they  were  pleased  to  call 
their  rights,  followed  close  at  Lord  Stir- 
ling's aggressive  heels.  Governor  Win- 
throp,  on  behalf  of  the  General  Court 
at  Hartford,  drew  up  (June  17,  1661)  for 
the  King's  consideration  a  "loyal  ad- 
dress": that  wandered  on  lightly  from 
expressions  of  loyalty  to  a  specific  request 
for  a  new  charter  by  which  his  Majesty 
would  assure  them  in  possession  of  their 
territory  against  the  Dutch — whom  they 
affably  described  as  "noxious  neigh- 
bours," having  "not  so  much  as  the  copy 
of  a  patent "  to  the  lands  which  they  held. 
That  there  might  be  no  room  for  a  doubt 
as  to  what  they  wanted,  they  asked  in 
set  terms  for  a  charter — calmly  inclusive 
of  the  unpatented  lands  of  their  "  noxious 
neighbours" — that  should  cover  all  the 
country  "eastward  of  Plymouth  line, 
northward  to  the  limits  of  the  Massachu- 
178 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

setts  colony,  and  westward  to  the  Bay 
of  Delaware,  if  it  may  be";  and  that 
their  modest  petition  might  be  presented 
properly  and  urged  effectively  they  com- 
missioned Governor  Winthrop  as  their 
agent  to  carry  it  to  England  and  to  lay 
it  before  the  King. 

In  those  days  passages  across  the 
Atlantic  were  taken  where  they  offered. 
Actually,  Winthrop  went  down  to  New 
Amsterdam — where  he  was  given  an 
"honourable  and  kind  reception" — and 
sailed  for  England  in  the  Dutch  ship 
De  Trouw.  The  Governor  was  not  a 
dull  man,  and  I  think  that  he  must 
have  enjoyed,  in  the  strict  privacy  of  his 
inner  consciousness,  the  subtle  irony  of 
the  situation :  as  he  courteously  accepted 
his  "  honourable  and  kind  reception  "  and 
then  went  sailing  eastward  under  Dutch 
colors — and  all  the  while  having  in  his 
179 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

pocket  that  document  which  was  meant 
to  be  a  knife  in  the  neck  of  his  hosts  at 
New  Amsterdam  and  in  the  neck  of  the 
friendly  power  under  whose  flag  he  sailed. 
Had  there  been  a  Colonial  Office  in  those 
days,  and  had  Mr.  Chamberlain  been  at 
the  head  of  it,  how  he  would  have  relished 
the  story  which  that  first  colonial  agent 
would  have  had  to  tell  him  when  he  got 
to  land! 


XVII 

IN  a  way,  the  state  of  affairs  in  North 
America  in  the  year  1661  was  very 
like  the  state  of  affairs  in  South  Africa 
just  before  "  Captain  Jim  "  made  his  raid. 
It  all  was  on  a  smaller  scale,  of  course,  but 
the  facts  and  the  conditions  were  much 
the  same.  The  Dutch  were  loosely  seat- 
ed in  a  valuable  holding;  their  rule,  ar- 
bitrary and  corrupt,  was  resented  muti- 
nously by  in  -  crowding  greedy  English 
settlers  who  nominally  were  Dutch  sub- 
jects; a  belt  of  English  colonies — more 
complete  than  in  South  Africa  —  was 
tightening  about  them;  and  at  the  back 
of  all  the  forces  working  for  their  de- 
struction was  the  English  government: 
181 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

moved  by  the  normal  human  desire  to 
take  possession  of  other  people's  valuable 
property ;  and  more  deeply  moved  by  the 
instinctive  feeling  (which  had  no  parallel 
in  South  Africa)  that  only  by  crushing 
the  commerce  of  Holland  could  England 
become  the  leading  commercial  nation 
of  the  world. 

It  was  against  Dutch  commerce  that 
the  blow  was  struck  which  led  on  quickly 
— and  I  think  fortunately — to  the  ex- 
tinction of  the  Dutch  ownership  of  New 
Netherland.  That  blow  was  the  revi- 
sion, very  soon  after  the  Restoration,  of 
the  Navigation  Act  of  1651.  As  originally 
framed,  the  act  had  forbidden  the  im- 
portation of  goods  into  England  save  in 
English  ships  or  in  ships  belonging  to  the 
country  in  which  the  goods  were  pro- 
duced. As  amended,  the  act  forbade, 
after  December  i,  1660,  the  importation 
182 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

or  the  exportation  of  goods  into  or  from 
any  of  his  Majesty's  plantations  or  terri- 
tories in  Asia,  Africa,  or  America  save  in 
English  ships  of  which  "the  master  and 
three  fourths  of  the  mariners  at  least  are 
English." 

This  direct  thrust  at  the  commercial 
life  of  Holland  was  not  lessened  in  force 
by  the  Convention  agreed  upon  (Septem- 
ber 14,  1662)  between  England  and  the 
United  Provinces ;  rather,  indeed,  did  the 
friction  over  that  Convention  tend  to 
make  matters  worse.  Mr.  Brodhead,  in 
his  kindly  way,  asserts  that  "  the  Dutch 
fulfilled  their  stipulations  with  prompt- 
ness and  honor";  but,  with  all  due  def- 
erence to  Mr.  Brodhead,  the  Dutch  did 
nothing  of  the  sort — as  the  minutes  of  the 
Council  for  Foreign  Plantations  abun- 
dantly prove.  On  August  25,  1662,  the 
Council  ordered  that  "some  heads  of 
183 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

remedies  "  should  be  drawn  up  to  correct 
the  abuses  incident  to  "a  secret  trade 
driven  by  and  with  the  Dutch  for  Tobacco 
of  the  growth  of  the  English  Plantations, 
to  the  defrauding  His  Matie  of  his  Cus- 
toms and  contrary  to  the  intent  of  the 
Act  of  Navigation."  On  June  24,  1663, 
the  Council  issued  a  circular  letter  to  the 
governors  of  Virginia,  Maryland,  New 
England,  and  the  West  Indian  Islands, 
drawing  their  attention  to  the  "many 
neglects,  or  rather  contempts,  of  his 
Maties  commands  for  ye  true  observ- 
ance" of  the  Navigation  Act  "through 
the  dayly  practices  and  designes  sett  on 
foote  by  trading  into  forrain  parts  .  .  . 
both  by  land  and  sea  as  well  as  unto  ye 
Monadoes  and  other  Plantations  of  y6 
Hollanders " ;  and  in  an  undated  docu- 
ment (Trade  Papers  Ivii,  90)  giving 
"certaine  reasons  to  prove  if  the  Duch 
184 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

bee  admitted  trade  in  Virginia  it  wilbe 
greate  loss  to  the  Kings  Matie  and  prej- 
udice to  the  Plantacon,"  the  fact  is 
stated  that  "there  is  now  two  shippes 
going  from  Zeland  to  trade  there  w^  if 
they,  be  admitted  it  wilbe  losse  to  his 
Matie  at  least  4000",  w"*  by  your  Lord- 
shipps  wisdome  may  be  prevented." 

All  this,  with  more  like  it,  goes  to  show 
that  the  "promptness  and  honor"  of  the 
Dutch  in  living  up  to  the  stipulations  of 
the  Convention  left  a  little  to  be  desired 
on  the  side  of  practicality;  but  it  also 
goes  to  show  —  since  two  traders  are 
necessary  to  a  trade — that  the  English 
colonies  took  an  active  part  in  whistling 
the  laws  of  their  mother  country  down 
the  wind.  This  secondary  fact  is  brought 
out  with  clearness  in  a  report  (March  10, 
1663)  upon  the  South,  or  Delaware,  river 
colony,  which  contains  the  pregnant  as- 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

sertion:  "Trade  will  come  not  only  from 
the  City's  colony  but  from  the  English; 
who  offer,  if  we  will  trade  with  them,  to 
make  a  little  slit  in  the  door,  whereby  we 
can  reach  them  overland  without  hav- 
ing recourse  to  the  passage  by  sea,  lest 
trade  with  them  may  be  forbidden  by 
the  Kingdom  of  England,  which  will  not 
allow  us  that  in  their  colony." 

In  this  same  report  is  the  statement: 
"The  English  afford  us  an  instance  of 
the  worthiness  of  New  Netherland,  which 
from  their  Colony  alone  already  sends 
200  vessels,  both  large  and  small,  to  the 
Islands" — an  involved  presentment  of 
fact  that  Mr.  Brodhead  misunderstands, 
and  in  his  restatement  of  it  perverts  into 
meaning  that  the  trade  of  New  Nether- 
land  "with  the  West  Indies  and  the 
neighbouring  English  colonies  now  [1663] 
employed  two  hundred  vessels  annually." 
186 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

Obviously,  the  two  hundred  vessels  re- 
ferred to  in  the  report  hailed  from  Eng- 
lish colonial  ports;  and  they  are  cited  to 
show  the  "worthiness" — that  is  to  say, 
the  fitness — of  New  Netherland  to  take 
a  larger  share  in  the  intercolonial  trade. 
But  the  essential  fact  is  clear  that  the 
many  busy  little  ships  then  plying  in 
American  waters,  Dutch  and  English 
alike,  were  snapping  their  top-sails  at  the 
Navigation  Act,  and  that  a  deal  of  illegal 
trading  was  going  on  through  that  "  little 
slit  in  the  door."  Mr.  Brodhead — in  this 
case  with  absolute  correctness  —  sum- 
marizes the  situation:  "The  possession 
of  New  Netherland  by  the  Dutch  was,  in 
truth,  the  main  obstacle  to  the  enforce- 
ment of  the  restrictive  colonial  policy 
of  England."  And  the  obstacles  which 
stood  in  the  way  of  England's  colonial 
policy  in  those  days — there  is  no  very 
187 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

marked  change  in  these  days — had  to  go 
down. 

The  final  diplomatic  round  between 
England  and  Holland  began  in  January 
1664,  when  the  Dutch  ambassador  in 
London  was  directed  to  insist  upon  a 
ratification  by  the  British  government 
of  the  long-pending  Hartford  Treaty ;  and 
so,  by  a  definite  settlement  of  the  boun- 
dary question,  clear  the  air.  The  answer 
to  the  Dutch  demand  certainly  did  settle 
the  boundary  question,  and  certainly  did 
clear  the  air.  It  came  two  months  later 
(March  12-22)  in  the  shape  of  that  epoch- 
making  royal  patent  by  which  the  King 
granted  Long  Island  (released  by  the 
Earl  of  Stirling)  and  all  the  lands  and 
rivers  from  the  west  side  of  the  Connect- 
icut to  the  east  side  of  Delaware  Bay 
to  his  brother,  the  Duke  of  York. 

The  actual  conquest  of  New  Nether- 
188 


riON-OFTH 

K  ovy  MANNAI>U 

,-OR-N  KW-  AM  STy  1U >  AM  : 


(Photographed  for  this  work  from  the  original  in  the  British  Mus  - 


n"  1661-1664 
owing  New  Amsterdam  in  the  year  that  it  became  New  York) 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

land  by  the  force  sent  out  by  the  Duke 
of  York  to  take  possession  of  his  newly 
acquired  property,  as  I  have  written  else- 
where,   was    "a    mere    bit    of   bellicose 
etiquette:  a  polite  changing  of  garrisons, 
of  fealty,  and  of  flags";  and  by  way  of 
comment    upon    that    easy    shifting    of 
allegiance  I  farther  have  written  in  these 
general  terms:     "Under  the  government 
of  the  Dutch  West  India  Company,  the 
New  Netherland  had  been  managed  not 
as  a  national  dependency,  but  as  a  com- 
mercial  venture  which  was  expected  to 
bring  in  a  handsome  return.     Much  more 
than  the  revenue  necessary  to  maintain  a 
government  was  required  of  the  colonists ; 
and  at  the  same  time  the  restrictions  im- 
posed upon  private  trade — to  the  end 
that  the  trade  of  the  Company  might  be 
increased — were  so  onerous  as  materially 
to   diminish  the   earning  power  of  the 
189 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

individual,  and  correspondingly  to  make 
the  burden  of  taxation  the  heavier  to 
bear.  Nor  could  there  be  between  the 
colonists  and  the  Company — as  there 
could  have  been  between  the  colonists 
and  even  a  severe  home  government — a 
tie  of  loyalty.  Indeed,  the  situation  had 
become  so  strained  under  this  commercial 
despotism  that  the  inhabitants  of  New 
Amsterdam  almost  openly  sided  with  the 
English  when  the  formal  demand  for  a 
surrender  was  made — and  the  town  pass- 
ed into  British  possession,  and  became 
New  York,  without  the  striking  of  a 
single  blow." 


XVIII 

ON  the  side  of  ethics,  the  taking  over 
of  New  Netherland  by  the  English 
admits  of  differing  opinions.  Mr.  Brod- 
head  flat-footedly  calls  it  "  bold  robbery." 
Dr.  Asher,  himself  a  Dutchman,  regards 
it  as  the  occupation  by  the  English  of 
territory  that  was  theirs  by  right  of  dis- 
covery, of  settlement,  and  of  specific 
grant.  For  my  own  part — lacking  the 
temerity  to  pass  judgment  upon  so  vexed 
a  question — I  am  content  to  ignore  the 
ethical  side  of  that  easy  conquest  and  to 
ground  my  approval  of  it  on  the  fact  that, 
as  things  then  stood  in  Europe  and  in 
America,  it  was  the  only  practicable 
treatment  of  an  impossible  problem;  to 
191 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

which,  with  submission,  I  add  my  con- 
viction that  for  all  the  parties  in  interest 
it  was  the  best  substitute  for  a  solution 
possible  under  the  conditions  which  ob- 
tained. 

The  gain  to  England  was  so  obvious 
that  it  need  not  be  discussed.  The  gain 
to  Holland  was  getting  rid  of  a  nettle  of 
a  colony  which — by  involving  her  in  an 
outlay  of  more  than  a  million  guilders 
above  returns,  and  by  most  dangerously 
complicating  her  relations  with  her  most 
powerful  rival — from  first  to  last  did  little 
but  sting  her  hands.  The  gain  to  the 
English  colonies  in  America  was  an  im- 
mediate enlargement  of  intercolonial 
trade:  with  a  resultant  solidarity  of  in- 
terests which  strongly  helped — a  little 
more  than  a  century  later — to  bring  about 
their  formal  union  and  their  definite  in- 
dependence. The  gain  to  New  Nether- 
192 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

land — the  essential  matter  here  to  be 
considered — was  escape  from  a  harsh  and 
incompetent  government,  that  crushed 
trade  and  that  did  much  to  make  life 
unendurable,  to  the  fostering  care  of  a 
government  that  developed  trade  in  ev- 
ery direction  and  that  in  its  treatment 
of  individuals  erred  on  the  side  of 
laxness. 

Out  of  that  laxness  came  ill  results. 
That  the  morals  of  New  Amsterdam  did 
not  improve  under  English  rule  is  not 
surprising — because  New  Amsterdam  had 
no  morals.  On  the  other  hand,  its  im- 
morals — of  which  its  supply  was  exces- 
sive— developed  vigorously,  in  sympathy 
with  its  vigorously  developing  commercial 
life.  In  the  last  decade  of  the  seven- 
teenth century — what  with  our  pirates 
and  our  slavers  and  the  general  disposi- 
tion on  the  part  of  our  leading  citizens  to 

13  193 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

ride  a  hurdle  race  over  all  known  laws, 
including  the  Ten  Commandments — New 
York  certainly  was  as  vicious  a  little  sea- 
faring city  as  was  to  be  found  just  then  in 
all  Christendom.  But  the  fact  is  to  be 
borne  in  mind  that  the  evil  state  of  af- 
fairs which  developed  under  English  gov- 
ernment was  put  an  end  to  by  an  English 
governor.  And  the  farther  fact  is  to  be 
borne  in  mind  that  onward  from  the  time 
of  that  first  reform  governor  there  has 
been  in  this  town — as  there  conspicuous- 
ly was  not  in  this  town  during  the  Dutch 
period  of  its  history — at  least  an  avowed 
outward  respect  for  decency  and  for  law. 
I  do  not  assert,  of  course,  that  this  ad- 
mirable sentiment  has  shone  brilliantly 
or  steadfastly,  or  that  it  is  not  badly 
snowed  under  at  times  even  now;  but  I 
do  assert  that  until  we  came  under  Eng- 
lish rule  such  sentiment  practically  did 
194 


not  exist  at  all.  Lord  Bellomont  was  the 
first  of  our  governors — and  this  is  not  to 
cast  a  slight  upon  the  excellent  reor- 
ganizing work  of  Colonel  Nicolls — who 
forced  us  to  put  some  of  our  worst 
sins  behind  us,  and  so  set  us  in  the 
way  (along  which  we  still  are  flounder- 
ing) to  achieve  that  civic  rectitude  which 
was  an  unknown  virtue  in  the  Dutch 
times. 

Having  thus,  for  truth's  sake,  set  forth 
the  development  and  the  curbing  of  our 
immorals  which  followed  our  taking  on 
of  a  new  nationality,  I  am  free  to  make 
my  final  point  —  the  enormous  gain  in 
material  prosperity  —  in  favor  of  that 
shifting  of  ownership  which  changed  New 
Amsterdam  into  New  York.  When  the 
English  took  over  the  city  (September  8, 
1664)  the  number  of  houses  in  it — as 
shown  by  Cortelyou's  survey  of  the  year 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

1660 — was  about  350,  and  the  population 
was  about  1500  souls.  An  authoritative 
record  has  been  preserved — in  the  petition 
of  the  New  York  millers  and  merchants 
against  the  repeal  of  the  Bolting  Act — 
of  exactly  what  this  city  gained  in  its 
first  thirty  years  of  English  rule.  The 
petition  states  that  in  the  year  1678,  when 
the  Bolting  Act  became  operative,  the 
total  number  of  houses  in  New  York  was 
384;  the  total  number  of  beef-cattle 
slaughtered  was  400;  the  total  number 
of  sailing  craft  (3  ships,  7  boats,  8 
sloops)  was  18;  and  the  total  revenues 
of  the  city  were  less  than  ^2000.  The 
petition  farther  states  that  in  the  year 
1694  (there  is  a  secondary  interest  here, 
in  that  we  see  what  the  added  two 
centuries  have  done  for  us)  the  num- 
ber of  houses  had  increased  to  983; 
the  number  of  beef  -  cattle  slaughtered 
196 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

(largely  for  profitable  export  to  the 
West  Indies)  to  4000;  the  number  of 
sailing  craft  (60  ships,  40  boats,  25 
sloops)  to  125;  and  the  city's  revenues 
to  £5000. 

That  statement  of  fact  I  conceive  to 
be  the  most  striking  commentary  that 
can  be  made  upon  the  relative  material 
merits  of  Dutch  and  of  English  rule.  The 
sudden  prodigious  increase  of  the  popu- 
lation and  of  the  commerce  of  this  city 
equally  were  due  to  a  general  easement  of 
political  and  of  commercial  conditions: 
the  first  impossible  while  the  Dutch 
domination  continued;  and  the  second 
rigorously  withheld  (of  set  purpose  or 
of  set  stupidity)  during  the  four  decades 
that  the  West  India  Company  betrayed 
all  the  interests  of  New  Netherland  in 
order  to  gain — yet  failed  to  gain — its 
own  selfish  ends.  I  hope  that  we  may 
197 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

be  able  to  make  as  good  a  showing  in  the 
Philippines  at  the  end  of  our  first  thirty 
years. 

But  argument  for  or  against  that  bold 
robbery,  or  that  resumption  of  vested 
rights — as  our  two  most  authoritative 
historians,  with  a  somewhat  confusing 
divergence  of  opinion,  respectively  de- 
scribe the  English  acquisition  of  New 
Netherland — no  longer  is  necessary.  As 
I  have  written,  that  once  burning  ques- 
tion became  a  dead  issue  in  a  time  long 
past.  Whatever  were  the  equities  of  the 
conflicting  Dutch  and  English  claims  to 
the  most  valuable  slice  of  the  continent 
of  North  America,  they  were  quieted 
legally  by  the  Treaty  of  Breda.  And 
they  have  been  quieted  ethically — in  the 
flowing  of  the  years  since  that  remote 
diplomatic  agreement  was  executed — by 
198 


THE  DUTCH  FOUNDING  OF  NEW  YORK 

the  passage  of  the  property  in  dispute 
away  from  both  claimant  races  into  the 
possession  of  their  descendants :  who  have 
coalesced  into  a  new  race,  and  who  take 
their  title  from  themselves. 


INDEX 


PAGE 


AFRICA,  South,  comparison  with,  181 

Alabama,  Confederate  cruiser,  32 

Albany,  lobbying  at,  23,  39 

"Strikes"  at,  26 

Antwerp,  commerce  of,  destroyed,  33 

Archangel,  Russian  port,  7 

Armada,  the,  64 

Arms  of  Amsterdam,  cargo  of,  1626,  85 

Arms  of  New  York,  12,  58 

Arms  for  Indians,  Barent  sells,  100 

Confiscated,  99 

Patroons  sell,  69 

Public  sentiment  about,  100 

Trade  in,  98 

Van  Rensselaer  deals  in,  99 

West  India  Company  responsible  for,  101 

Asher,  life  of  Hudson  by,  44 

On  collapse  of  West  India  Company,  119 

On  Count  John  Maurice,  115 

On  Dutch  title  to  New  Netherland,  42 

On  English  conquest  of  N.  Netherland,  191 

201 


INDEX 

PAGE 

BAHIA  captured,  60 
Baltimore,  Lord,  territorial  claims  of,  170,  174 

Barent  sells  arms  to  Indians,  100 

Barneveldt,  execution  of,  35,  44 

Opposes  West  India  Company,  33 
Baxter,  George,  drafts  remonstrance,  1653,  156 

Leader  of  rebellion,   1655,  97 

Official  interpreter,  95,  97 
Baxter,  Thomas,  builds  Wall  St.  palisadoes,  122 

Piracies  of,  126 

Beaver  in  civic  arms,  58 

Belgian  refugees  in  Holland,  30,  33 

Bellomont,  Lord,  character  of,  no 

Reforms  by,  195 

Blake,  Admiral,  122 

Block,  Adrien,  commands  Tiger,  13 

Discoveries  of,  16 
"Blood  from  King  of  Spain's  heart,"  63 

Bogardus,  daughter  married,  81 

Bolting  Act,  the,  of  1698,  196 

Reference  to,  59 

"  Bosch-lopers,"  99 

"Boss"  and  city  charter  synchronous,  142 

Bout  signs  remonstrance,  1649,  76 

Brazil,  colony  in,  115 

Conquests  in,  60 

Evacuated,  1654,  118 
202 


INDEX 

PAGE 

Breda,  Treaty  of,                                        44,  198 

Bridgman,  Orlando,  49 

Brodhead,  collector  of  documents,  2 

On  city  charter,  140 

On  Dutch  title  to  New  Netherland,  42 

On  English  conquest  of  N.  Netherland,  191 

Buzzard's  Bay,  17 

"CAPTAIN  JIM'S"  raid,  181 

Carleton,  Sir  Dudley,  53 

Chamberlain,  Mr.,                                        53,  180 

Charter,  city,  Brodhead  on,  140 

Granted  to  New  Amsterdam,  1653,  139 

Of  liberties  and  exemptions,  1640,  94 

Stuyvesant  proclaims,  140 

West  India  Company,  granted,  1621,  45 

Christiansen,  Hendrick,  13 

Church,  dissatisfaction  with,  80 

Subscriptions  to,  81 

City  Tavern  built,  1642,  96 

Civic  rectitude  unknown,  195 

Coenties  Slip,  96 

Colonial  discontent,  nature  of,  83 

Commissioners  of  New  England,  124 

Congo  Protectorate,  8,  72 

Connecticut  sends  loyal  address  to  King,  178 

Territorial  claims  of,  178 

203 


INDEX 

PAGE 

Connecticut  river  (Fresh  Water),  18 

Convention  of  1653,  151 

Frames  remonstrance,  156 

How  organized,  155 

Opposed  by  Stuyvesant,  154 

Couwenhoven  signs  remonstrance,  1649,  76 

Cromwell,  death  of,  174 

Plans  annexation  of  New  Netherland,  162 

Custom-house,  new,  13 

DELAWARE  RIVER,  see  South  river, 

De  Vries,  D.  P.,  his  opinion  of  the  English,  89 

Honesty  of,  73 

Stiffens  Van  Twiller's  backbone,  89 

Director  General,  official  title  of  Governor,  70 

"Door,  little  slit  in  the,"  186 

Dutch    colonists,    characteristics   of,       2,  9,  72 

Disloyalty  of,  164 

"Noxious  neighbours,"  178 

Dutch  somnolence   a  myth,      4,  9,   14,  27,  46 

Dyck,  H.  van,  on  Van  Tienhoven,  144 

Dyer  and  Underhill,  piracies  of,  126 

EAST  INDIA  COMPANY,  purpose  of,  47 

Eendracht,  case  of  the  ship,  91 

Elbertsen  signs  remonstrance,  1649,  76 

England,  peace  with  Holland,  1654,  162 
204 


INDEX 

PAGE 

England  protests  planting  of  N.Netherland,  53 

War  with  Holland,  1652,  122 

English  claim  to  New  Netherland,  45 

Colonists  call  convention,  152 

Dissatisfied,  152 

Revolt  of,  163 

Conquest  of  New  Netherland,  ethics  of,  191 

Cordon  around  New  Netherland,  167 

Grant  covering  New  Netherland,  52 

In  New  Amsterdam,   1642,  95 

On  Long  Island  rebel,  97 

Ship,  first,  in  Hudson  river,  88 

Refused  trading  license,  88 

Exports  from  New  Netherland,  85,  86 

From  New  York,  1678,  1694,  195 

FENDALL,  Gov.,  claims  South  river  colony,    171 

Feudalism  in  America,  68 

"Figurative  Map,  the,"  20,  41 

Flushing,  delegates  from,  153 

Fort  Leavenworth,  comparison  with,  108 

Fort,  the,  site  of,  13 

Fraunces's  Tavern,  16 

Fresh  Water  (Connecticut  river),  18 

Fur  trade,  Dutch,  with  Russia,  6 

At  Manhattan,  8,  85 

Values  of  peltries,  86 

205 


INDEX 

PAGE 

GEORGE  III.,  our  feeling  toward,  84 

Gravesend,  delegates  from,  153 

HAGUE,  THE,  lobbying  at,  22,  39 

Hall  signs  remonstrance,  1649,  7 6 

Hardenburg  signs  remonstrance,  1649,  76 

Hartford,  Treaty  of,  granted  too  much,        132 

Ignored  by  Massachusetts,  168 

Ratification  of,  demanded,  188 

Heermans,  A.,  and  Van  Tienhoven,  148 

Signs  remonstrance,   1649,  7  6 

Hell  Gate,  Onrust  goes  through,  17 

Hendricksen,  Cornells,  17,  19 

Heyn,  Admiral  Peter,  61 

Holland,  peace  with  England,  1654,  162 

Political  parties  in,  34 

Protests  against  English  aggression,      177 

Truce  with  Spain,  1609,  34 

War  with  England,  1652,  122 

Hongers,  Hans,  40 

Hoogvelt,  Lysbet  van,  145 

Houses  in  New  York,  1664-78-94,  195 

Hudson,  Henry,  death  of,  6 

Discoveries  of,  4 

Life  of,  by  Asher,  44 

Report  on  fur  trade  by,  7 

Hudson  river  called  Mauritius,  13 

206 


INDEX 

PAGE 

Hudson  river,  Discovery  of,  4 

Massachusetts  claims  passage  of,  169 

INDIAN  war  of  1643,  71 

Effects  of,  103 

Indians,  arms  sold  to,  69,  98 

Land  grants  from,  167 

Sale  of  liquor  to,  forbidden,  109 

Intercolonial  trade,  circa  1635,  1642,  88,  95 

Illicit,  184 

Interpreter,  official,  1642,  95 

Irving,  misrepresentations  of,  i,  105,  132 

JACOBSEN,  C.,  commands  the  Fortune,  13 

Jansen  signs  remonstrance,  1649  76 

Johannesberg,  7  2 

KAMPEN,  JOAN  VAN,  135 
Kieft,  Wm.,  Director  General,  1638-46,         70 

An  ex-bankrupt,  70 
Arraigned  in  remonstrance  of  1649,        79 

Church  built  by,  81 

Death  of,  71 

Liberal  government  of,  95 

Portrait  hung  on  gallows,  70 

Provokes  Indian  war,  71 

Steals  ransom  money,  71 
207 


INDEX 

PAGE 

Kieft  welcomes  refugees  from  N.  England,       95 

Worst  of  all  the  Directors,  70 

Kip  signs  remonstrance,  1649,  76 

Kruger,  President,  72 

LAND  grants  from  Indians,  167 

Unfairly  made,  158 

Liberties  and  exemptions,  charter  of,  94 

Lobbying  at  The  Hague,  22,  38 

Long  Island  claimed  by  Lord  Stirling,  175 

English  on,   1659,  167 

Granted  to  Duke  of  York,  188 

Granted  to  Lord  Stirling,            .  175 

Released  by  Lord  Stirling,  188 

Loockermans  signs  remonstrance,   1649,  76 

Lothair,  of  Congo  Protectorate,  72 

Loyalty  non-existent,  164 

MANHATTAN  ISLAND  bought,  85 

Settlement  on,  54 

Manifest,  first  ship's,  86 

"Map,  the  Figurative,"  20,  41 

Maryland,  trouble  with,  171 

Marylanders'  sporting  offer,  172 

Massachusetts,  pacific  acts  of,  127,  128,  129,  137 

Territorial  claims  of,  168 

Maurice,  Count  John,  115 

208 


INDEX 


PAGE 


Mauritius  (Hudson)  river,  13 

May-day  movings,  57 

May,  first  Director  General,  7° 

Milner,  Sir  Alfred,  53 

NAHANT  (Pye  Bay), 

Narragansett  Bay, 

Navigation  Act  of  1651, 

Of  1660,  l82 

Evasion  of,  l84 

Negroes,  permission  to  import,  133 

New  Amsterdam  becomes  New  York,  190 

City  charter  granted,  1653,  139 

English  in,  1642,  95 

First  permanent  colonists  of,  57 

Founded,  5° 

Immorals  of,  J93 

In  war  time,  1652,  122 

Named,  56 

Ordered  to  be  made  clean,  no 

New  England  commissioners,  124 

Confederation,  1643,  124 
Desire  in,  to  fight  the  Dutch,  125,  128,  162 
Early  trade  with  New  Netherland,  87,  90 

New  Netherland,  an  obstacle  to  England,     187 

Condition  of,  in   1624,  85 

Condition  of,  in  1629,  66 
14  209 


INDEX 

PAGE 

New  Netherland,  condition  of,  in  1647,        103 

Condition  of,  in  1649,  77,  108 

Condition  of,  in  1653,  157 

Condition  of,  in  1654,  163 

Condition  of,  circa  1660,  113 

Condition  of,  in  1 66 1,  181 

Cromwell's  plan  for  annexing,  162 

Dutch  title  to,  42 

Early  trade  with  New  England,  87,  90 

Easy  conquest  of,  186 

English  claim  to,  45,  52 

Erected  into  a  province,  58 

Ethics  of  English  conquest  of,  191 

Exports  from,  1624,  85 

Exports  from,  1628-1635,  86 

First  official  use  of  name,  41 

Forces  destructive  to,             113,  120,  187 

Good  results  of  English  rule,  195 

Granted  to  Duke  of  York,  188 

Limits  defined,  1616,  19 

Not  named  in  W.  I.  Co.  charter,  51 

Price  of  passage  to,  reduced,  133 

Population  of,  in  1629,  67 

Results  of  English  conquest  of,  192 

Unprepared  for  war,  1654,  163 

Company  chartered,  40 

Directors  of,  19 
210 


INDEX 

PAGE 

New  Netherland  Company,  members  of,         40 

Newtown,  delegates  from,  153 

New  York,  arms  of,  12,  58 

Benefited  by  English  rule,  195 

Lawlessness  of,  1690—1700,  193 

Pirates,  193 

Reformed  by  Lord  Bellomont,  195 

Statistics  of,  1664,  1678,  1694,  195 

Nicholas,  Saint,  patron  of  New  York,  105 

Onrust,  yacht,  built,  12,  13 

Discoveries  made  in,  16,  19 

Goes  through  Hell  Gate,  17 

Monument  to,  15 

Orange,  House  of,  a  rallying  centre,  34 

Oyster  Bay  line,  167 

PASSAGE,  price  of,  to  N.  Netherland  reduced,  133 

Patroons,  grants  to,  68 

Relics  of  feudalism,  68 

Sell  arms  to  Indians,  69 

Peace  of  1654,  Holland  and  England,  162 

Pelgrom,  Paulus,  19,  40 

Pernambuco  captured,  60 

Petition  of  Lord  Stirling  to  Charles  II.,  175 

Pilot  who  dared  all  for  love,  91 

Piracies  on  Long  Island  Sound,  126,  153,  154 

211 


INDEX 

PAGE 

Pirates  of  New  York,  193 

Placard  encouraging  discovery,  20,  21,  24 

Planters'  Plea,  The,  66 

Plymouth  Company,  grant  to,  52 

Population  of  New  Netherland  in  1629,         67 

Pye  Bay  (Nahant),  17,   18 

RAEF,  SEBASTIEN,  piracies  of,  135 

Rebellion  on  Long  Island,  1655,  97 

Refugees  from   Belgium,  30,  33 

From  New  England,  95 

"Rehoboam,  the  crowning  of,"  no 

Remonstrance  of  1649,  75 

Author  of,  76 

On  Stuyvesant,  105 

On  Van  Tienhoven,  143 

Signers  of,  76 

Tone  of,  81 

Remonstrance  of  1653,  155 

Author  of,  156 

Rejected  by  West  India  Company,       160 

Resented  by  Stuyvesant,  160 

Tone  of,  *59 

Remonstrances,  various,  94.  J66 

Restoration,  the,  174 

Revenues  of  New  York,  1678,  1694,  195 

Rhode  Island,  disrepute  of,  126 

212 


INDEX 

PAGE 

Russia,  Dutch  trade  with,  6 


SALEM,  teacher  of  church  at,  128 

Santiago,  battle  of,  64 

Schout,  duties  of,  142 

Ship  Arms  of  Amsterdam,  85 

Eendracht,  case  of  the,  91 

English,  refused  trading  license,  88 

First,  built  on  Manhattan,  n 

First  English,  in  Hudson  river,  88 

First  trading,  at  Manhattan,  8 

Tiger  burned,  13 

Shipping  of  New  York,  1678,  1694,  195 

Ships,  how  built,  14 

"Slate,"  the  first,  141 

Slave  trade,  beginning  of,  133 

"Slit  in  the  door,  little,"  186 

Smuggling,  remonstrance  1649,  78 

Stuyvesant  tries  to  check,  109 

South  river  colony,  170 

Claimed  by  Maryland,  171,  172,  174 

Illicit  trade  with,  185 

Swedish  colony  on,  131,  170 

Spain,  colonial  weakness  of,  30 

King  of,  blood  from  heart  of,  63 

Oppression  of,  33 

Poor  fighter  at  sea,  64 

213 


INDEX 

PAGE 

Spain's  truce  with  Holland,  1609,  34,  35 

Ends,  1621,  44 

Spanish  colonies,  trade  with,  133 

Sporting  offer  of  Marylanders,  172 

Stadt  Huys  built,  1642,  96 

Convention  of  1653  held  in,  151 

State  rights,  doctrine  of,  129 

States  General,  placard  of  1614,  21 

West  India  Company  before,  37 

Statute  of  Uses  circumvented,  48 

Stirling,  Lord,  claims  Long  Island,  175 

Petition  of,  175 

Releases  Long  Island,  188 

Stockton's  "Great  War  Syndicate,"  32 

Stuyvesant,  Peter,  Direc.  Gen.,  1647-64,     103 

Bad  domestic  policy  of,  137 

Characteristics  of,  105,  in 

Charged  with  inciting  Indian  rising,      124 

Concludes  conventions  with  Virginia,    133 

Derives    his    power    "from    God  and 

the  Company,"  160,  161 

Fosters  foreign  trade,  136 

Good  foreign  policy  of,           124,  131,  136 

Ineffective  as  a  reformer,  in 

Irving's  caricature  of,  105 

Lays  tax  on  wines  and  liquors,  no 

Makes  the  first  "slate,"  141 
214 


INDEX 

PAGE 

Stuyvesant,  P.,  opposes  convention  of  1653,  154 

Orders  town  to  be  made  clean,  no 

Proclaims  city  charter,  140 

Reduces  Swedish  colony,  131 

Reforms  attempted  by,  109 

Resents  remonstrance  of  1653,  160 

Temporizing  policy  of,  98 
Terms  offered  by,  to  New  England,      125 

Sunset,  claim  down  to,  168 

Swedish  colony  founded,  1638,  170 

Reduced,  1655,  131 

TAMMANY  methods  in  1653,  141,  150 

Tavern,  the  City,  built,  1642,  96 

Tax  laid  on  wines  and  liquors,  no 

Tienhoven,  Adriaen  van,  detected  in  fraud,   150 

Cornelis  van,  character  of,  143 

Made  schout,  142 

Seduces  Lysbet  van  Hoogvelt,  145 

Tobacco,  close  season  for,  172 

Export  tax  on,  removed,  133 

Secret  trade  in,  184 

Trade  hampered,  remonstrance  1649,  77 

In  1624,  85 

Intercolonial,  circa  1635,  88 

Circa  1642,  95 

England  objects  to,  88,  90 

215 


INDEX 

PAGE 

Trade,  intercolonial,  illicit,  184 

Made  easier,  1640,  94 

Secret,  in  tobacco,  184 

With  drunken  savages,  109 

With  Spanish  colonies,  133 

With  West  Indies,  197 

Wrangles  over  the  American,  27 

Treasure  fleet  captured,  60 

Treaty  of  Hartford  granted  too  much,         132 

Ignored  by  Massachusetts,  168 

Ratification  demanded,  188 

Trojan  Horse,  the,  164 

Tromp,  Admiral  van,  122 

Truce,  the  twelve  years',  34,  44 

Tweenhuyzen,  Lambrecht  van,  19,  40 

UNDERBILL  and  Dyer,  piracies  of,  126 

United  Colonies  of  New  England,  the,  124 

Uses,  statute  of,  circumvented,  48 

Usselincx,  William,  3° 

VAN  CORTLANDT  signs  remonstrance,  1649,  7^ 

Van  der  Douck  drafts  remonstrance,  1649,  76 

Van  Rensselaer  deals  in  arms  for  Indians,  99 
Van  Twiller  drives  out  English  trading  ship,   89 

Verhulst,  second  Director  General,  70 
Virginia,  conventions  with,-                            133 
216 


INDEX 

PAGE 

Virginia,  trade  with,  88,  90,  133 

Visscher,  schipper,  123 
Vries,  see  De  Vries. 

WALLOON  colonists,  57 

Wall  Street  palisadoes,  122 
War  between  Holland  and  England,  1652,     122 

Indian,  of  1643,  71 

West  India  Company,  the,  29 

Answer  to  Lord  Baltimore,  176 

Arraigned,  1649,  77 

Before  States  General,  37 

Captures  treasure  fleet,  60 

Causes  of  its  collapse,  114 

Chartered,  45 

Conquests  in  Brazil,  60 

Inquiry  into  affairs  of,  1638,  94 
Memorial  against  English  aggression,    177 

Naval  strength  of,  62 

No  precedent  for,  48 

Opposed  by  Barne veldt,  33 

Organized  to  make  war,  47 

Rapacity  of,  189 

Rejects  remonstrance  of  1653,  160 

Remonstrates  against  truce,  62 

Report  on  New  Netherland,  1629,  60 

Rights  and  obligations  of,  45 
217 


INDEX 

PAGE 

West  India  Co.,  selfish  policy  of,  a  failure,  197 

War  winnings  of,  61 

Writes  to  Burgomasters  and  Sch^epens,  161 

West  Indies,  illicit  trade  with,  184 

Trade  with,  88,  197 

Windmill  in  the  Fort,  80 

Wines  and  liquors  taxed,  no 

Winthrop,  Gov.,  drafts  address  to  King,  178 

Goes  in  Dutch  ship  to  England,  179 

Kindly  received  at  New  Amsterdam,  170 

Witssen,  Gerrit  Jacob,  19 

Jonas,  19 

Wooley,  Charles,  cited,  86 

YORK,  DUKE  OF,  grant  to,  188 


THE    END 


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